Engineering the Dynamics of Effective Spin-Chain Models for Strongly Interacting Atomic Gases

We consider a one-dimensional gas of cold atoms with strong contact interactions and construct an effective spin-chain Hamiltonian for a two-component system. The resulting Heisenberg spin model can be engineered by manipulating the shape of the external confining potential of the atomic gas. We find that bosonic atoms offer more flexibility for tuning independently the parameters of the spin Hamiltonian through interatomic (intra-species) interaction which is absent for fermions due to the Pauli exclusion principle. Our formalism can have important implications for control and manipulation of the dynamics of few- and many-body quantum systems; as an illustrative example relevant to quantum computation and communication, we consider state transfer in the simplest non-trivial system of four particles representing exchange-coupled qubits.Comment: 10 pages including appendix, 3 figures, revised versio

Symmetric photon-photon coupling by atoms with Zeeman-split sublevels

We propose a simple scheme for highly efficient nonlinear interaction between two weak optical fields. The scheme is based on the attainment of electromagnetically induced transparency simultaneously for both fields via transitions between magnetically split F=1 atomic sublevels, in the presence of two driving fields. Thereby, equal slow group velocities and symmetric cross-coupling of the weak fields over long distances are achieved. By simply tuning the fields, this scheme can either yield giant cross-phase modulation or ultrasensitive two-photon switching.Comment: Modified scheme, 4 pages, 1 figur

Effect of time delay on the onset of synchronization of the stochastic Kuramoto model

We consider the Kuramoto model of globally coupled phase oscillators with time-delayed interactions, that is subject to the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (Gaussian) colored or the non-Gaussian colored noise. We investigate numerically the interplay between the influences of the finite correlation time of noise $\tau$ and the time delay $\tau_{d}$ on the onset of the synchronization process. Both cases for identical and nonidentical oscillators had been considered. Among the obtained results for identical oscillators is a large increase of the synchronization threshold as a function of time delay for the colored non-Gaussian noise compared to the case of the colored Gaussian noise at low noise correlation time $\tau$. However, the difference reduces remarkably for large noise correlation times. For the case of nonidentical oscillators, the incoherent state may become unstable around the maximum value of the threshold (as a function of time delay) even at lower coupling strength values in the presence of colored noise as compared to the noiseless case. We had studied the dependence of the critical value of the coupling strength (the threshold of synchronization) on given parameters of the stochastic Kuramoto model in great details and presented results for possible cases of colored Gaussian and non-Gaussian noises.Comment: 19 pages with 7 figure

Joint density-functional theory for electronic structure of solvated systems

We introduce a new form of density functional theory for the {\em ab initio} description of electronic systems in contact with a molecular liquid environment. This theory rigorously joins an electron density-functional for the electrons of a solute with a classical density-functional theory for the liquid into a single variational principle for the free energy of the combined system. A simple approximate functional predicts, without any fitting of parameters to solvation data, solvation energies as well as state-of-the-art quantum-chemical cavity approaches, which require such fitting.Comment: Fixed typos and minor updates to tex