Systematic ranging and late warning asteroid impacts

We describe systematic ranging, an orbit determination technique especially suitable to assess the near-term Earth impact hazard posed by newly discovered asteroids. For these late warning cases, the time interval covered by the observations is generally short, perhaps a few hours or even less, which leads to severe degeneracies in the orbit estimation process. The systematic ranging approach gets around these degeneracies by performing a raster scan in the poorly-constrained space of topocentric range and range rate, while the plane of sky position and motion are directly tied to the recorded observations. This scan allows us to identify regions corresponding to collision solutions, as well as potential impact times and locations. From the probability distribution of the observation errors, we obtain a probability distribution in the orbital space and then estimate the probability of an Earth impact. We show how this technique is effective for a number of examples, including 2008 TC3 and 2014 AA, the only two asteroids to date discovered prior to impact

Energy Dependence of Scattering Ground State Polar Molecules

We explore the total cross section of ground state polar molecules in an electric field at various energies, focusing on RbCs and RbK. An external electric field polarizes the molecules and induces strong dipolar interactions leading to non-zero partial waves contributing to the scattering even as the collision energy goes to zero. This results in the need to compute scattering problems with many different values of total M to converge the total cross section. An accurate and efficient approximate total cross section is introduced and used to study the low field temperature dependence. To understand the scattering of the polar molecules we compare a semi-classical cross section with quantum unitarity limit. This comparison leads to the ability to characterize the scattering based on the value of the electric field and the collision energy.Comment: Accepted PRA, 10 pages, 5 figure

Strongly correlated gases of Rydberg-dressed atoms: quantum and classical dynamics

We discuss techniques to generate long-range interactions in a gas of groundstate alkali atoms, by weakly admixing excited Rydberg states with laser light. This provides a tool to engineer strongly correlated phases with reduced decoherence from inelastic collisions and spontaneous emission. As an illustration, we discuss the quantum phases of dressed atoms with dipole-dipole interactions confined in a harmonic potential, as relevant to experiments. We show that residual spontaneous emission from the Rydberg state acts as a heating mechanism, leading to a quantum-classical crossover.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Quantum Communication in Spin Systems With Long-Range Interactions

We calculate the fidelity of transmission of a single qubit between distant sites on semi-infinite and finite chains of spins coupled via the magnetic dipole interaction. We show that such systems often perform better than their Heisenberg nearest-neighbour coupled counterparts, and that fidelities closely approaching unity can be attained between the ends of finite chains without any special engineering of the system, although state transfer becomes slow in long chains. We discuss possible optimization methods, and find that, for any length, the best compromise between the quality and the speed of the communication is obtained in a nearly uniform chain of 4 spins.Comment: 15 pages, 8 eps figures, updated references, corrected text and corrected figs. 1, 4 and

A superfluid-droplet crystal and a free-space supersolid in a dipole-blockaded gas

A novel supersolid phase is predicted for an ensemble of Rydberg atoms in the dipole-blockade regime, interacting via a repulsive dipolar potential "softened" at short distances. Using exact numerical techniques, we study the low temperature phase diagram of this system, and observe an intriguing phase consisting of a crystal of mesoscopic superfluid droplets. At low temperature, phase coherence throughout the whole system, and the ensuing bulk superfluidity, are established through tunnelling of identical particles between neighbouring droplets.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Quantum Degenerate Systems

Degenerate dynamical systems are characterized by symplectic structures whose rank is not constant throughout phase space. Their phase spaces are divided into causally disconnected, nonoverlapping regions such that there are no classical orbits connecting two different regions. Here the question of whether this classical disconnectedness survives quantization is addressed. Our conclusion is that in irreducible degenerate systems --in which the degeneracy cannot be eliminated by redefining variables in the action--, the disconnectedness is maintained in the quantum theory: there is no quantum tunnelling across degeneracy surfaces. This shows that the degeneracy surfaces are boundaries separating distinct physical systems, not only classically, but in the quantum realm as well. The relevance of this feature for gravitation and Chern-Simons theories in higher dimensions cannot be overstated.Comment: 18 pages, no figure

Strongly correlated 2D quantum phases with cold polar molecules: controlling the shape of the interaction potential

We discuss techniques to tune and shape the long-range part of the interaction potentials in quantum gases of polar molecules by dressing rotational excitations with static and microwave fields. This provides a novel tool towards engineering strongly correlated quantum phases in combination with low dimensional trapping geometries. As an illustration, we discuss a 2D crystalline phase, and a superfluid-crystal quantum phase transition.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure