Unification of SU(2)xU(1) Using a Generalized Covariant Derivative and U(3)

A generalization of the Yang-Mills covariant derivative, that uses both vector and scalar fields and transforms as a 4-vector contracted with Dirac matrices, is used to simplify and unify the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam model. Since SU(3) assigns the wrong hypercharge to the Higgs boson, it is necessary to use a special representation of U(3) to obtain all the correct quantum numbers. A surplus gauge scalar boson emerges in the process, but it uncouples from all other particles.Comment: 12 pages, no figures. To be published in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Theoretical investigation of electron-hole complexes in anisotropic two-dimensional materials

Trions and biexcitons in anisotropic two-dimensional materials are investigated within an effective mass theory. Explicit results are obtained for phosphorene and arsenene, materials that share features such as a direct quasi-particle gap and anisotropic conduction and valence bands. Trions are predicted to have remarkably high binding energies and an elongated electron-hole structure with a preference for alignment along the armchair direction, where the effective masses are lower. We find that biexciton binding energies are also notably large, especially for monolayer phosphorene, where they are found to be twice as large as those for typical monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides.Comment: 3 figures, 5 pages + Supplementary Material, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

The split-operator technique for the study of spinorial wavepacket dynamics

The split-operator technique for wave packet propagation in quantum systems is expanded here to the case of propagating wave functions describing Schr\"odinger particles, namely, charge carriers in semiconductor nanostructures within the effective mass approximation, in the presence of Zeeman effect, as well as of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interactions. We also demonstrate that simple modifications to the expanded technique allow us to calculate the time evolution of wave packets describing Dirac particles, which are relevant for the study of transport properties in graphene.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Enhanced Optical Dichroism of Graphene Nanoribbons

The optical conductivity of graphene nanoribbons is analytical and exactly derived. It is shown that the absence of translation invariance along the transverse direction allows considerable intra-band absorption in a narrow frequency window that varies with the ribbon width, and lies in the THz range domain for ribbons 10-100nm wide. In this spectral region the absorption anisotropy can be as high as two orders of magnitude, which renders the medium strongly dichroic, and allows for a very high degree of polarization (up to ~85) with just a single layer of graphene. The effect is resilient to level broadening of the ribbon spectrum potentially induced by disorder. Using a cavity for impedance enhancement, or a stack of few layer nanoribbons, these values can reach almost 100%. This opens a potential prospect of employing graphene ribbon structures as efficient polarizers in the far IR and THz frequencies.Comment: Revised version. 10 pages, 7 figure

Noisy metrology beyond the standard quantum limit

Parameter estimation is of fundamental importance in areas from atomic spectroscopy and atomic clocks to gravitational wave detection. Entangled probes provide a significant precision gain over classical strategies in the absence of noise. However, recent results seem to indicate that any small amount of realistic noise restricts the advantage of quantum strategies to an improvement by at most a multiplicative constant. Here, we identify a relevant scenario in which one can overcome this restriction and attain superclassical precision scaling even in the presence of uncorrelated noise. We show that precision can be significantly enhanced when the noise is concentrated along some spatial direction, while the Hamiltonian governing the evolution which depends on the parameter to be estimated can be engineered to point along a different direction. In the case of perpendicular orientation, we find superclassical scaling and identify a state which achieves the optimum.Comment: Erroneous expressions with inconsistent units have been corrected. 5 pages, 3 figures + Appendi

Quantum computing with incoherent resources and quantum jumps

Spontaneous emission and the inelastic scattering of photons are two natural processes usually associated with decoherence and the reduction in the capacity to process quantum information. Here we show that when suitably detected, these photons are sufficient to build all the fundamental blocks needed to perform quantum computation in the emitting qubits while protecting them from deleterious dissipative effects. We exemplify by showing how to teleport an unknown quantum state and how to efficiently prepare graph states for the implementation of measurement-based quantum computation.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure