2,341 research outputs found
Measuring entanglement in condensed matter systems
We show how entanglement may be quantified in spin and cold atom many-body
systems using standard experimental techniques only. The scheme requires no
assumptions on the state in the laboratory and a lower bound to the
entanglement can be read off directly from the scattering cross section of
Neutrons deflected from solid state samples or the time-of-flight distribution
of cold atoms in optical lattices, respectively. This removes a major obstacle
which so far has prevented the direct and quantitative experimental study of
genuine quantum correlations in many-body systems: The need for a full
characterization of the state to quantify the entanglement contained in it.
Instead, the scheme presented here relies solely on global measurements that
are routinely performed and is versatile enough to accommodate systems and
measurements different from the ones we exemplify in this work.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure
Steady state entanglement in the mechanical vibrations of two dielectric membranes
We consider two dielectric membranes suspended inside a Fabry-Perot-cavity,
which are cooled to a steady state via a drive by suitable classical lasers. We
show that the vibrations of the membranes can be entangled in this steady
state. They thus form two mechanical, macroscopic degrees of freedom that share
steady state entanglement.Comment: example for higher environment temperatures added, further
explanations added to the tex
Critical and noncritical long range entanglement in the Klein-Gordon field
We investigate the entanglement between two separated segments in the vacuum
state of a free 1D Klein-Gordon field, where explicit computations are
performed in the continuum limit of the linear harmonic chain. We show that the
entanglement, which we measure by the logarithmic negativity, is finite with no
further need for renormalization. We find that the quantum correlations decay
much faster than the classical correlations as in the critical limit long range
entanglement decays exponentially for separations larger than the size of the
segments. As the segments become closer to each other the entanglement diverges
as a power law. The noncritical regime manifests richer behavior, as the
entanglement depends both on the size of the segments and on their separation.
In correspondence with the von Neumann entropy long-range entanglement also
distinguishes critical from noncritical systems
Dephasing-assisted transport: quantum networks and biomolecules
Original article can be found at: http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/1367-2630/1 DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/10/11/113019Transport phenomena are fundamental in physics. They allow for information and energy to be exchanged between individual constituents of communication systems, networks or even biological entities. Environmental noise will generally hinder the efficiency of the transport process. However, and contrary to intuition, there are situations in classical systems where thermal fluctuations are actually instrumental in assisting transport phenomena. Here we show that, even at zero temperature, transport of excitations across dissipative quantum networks can be enhanced by local dephasing noise. We explain the underlying physical mechanisms behind this phenomenon and propose possible experimental demonstrations in quantum optics. Our results suggest that the presence of entanglement does not play an essential role for energy transport and may even hinder it. We argue that Nature may be routinely exploiting dephasing noise and show that the transport of excitations in simplified models of light harvesting molecules does benefit from such noise assisted processes. These results point toward the possibility for designing optimized structures for transport, for example in artificial nanostructures, assisted by noise.Peer reviewe
Quantum coherence in ion channels: Resonances, Transport and Verification
Recently it was demonstrated that long-lived quantum coherence exists during
excitation energy transport in photosynthesis. It is a valid question up to
which length, time and mass scales quantum coherence may extend, how to one may
detect this coherence and what if any role it plays for the dynamics of the
system. Here we suggest that the selectivity filter of ion channels may exhibit
quantum coherence which might be relevant for the process of ion selectivity
and conduction. We show that quantum resonances could provide an alternative
approch to ultrafast 2D spectroscopy to probe these quantum coherences. We
demonstrate that the emergence of resonances in the conduction of ion channels
that are modulated periodicallly by time dependent external electric fields can
serve as signitures of quantum coherence in such a system. Assessments of
experimental feasibility and specific paths towards the experimental
realization of such experiments are presented. We show that this may be probed
by direct 2-D spectroscopy or through the emergence of resonances in the
conduction of ion channels that are modulated periodically by time dependent
external electric fields.Comment: Under review for New Jorunal of Physic
Upper bounds on fault tolerance thresholds of noisy Clifford-based quantum computers
We consider the possibility of adding noise to a quantum circuit to make it efficiently simulatable classically. In previous works, this approach has been used to derive upper bounds to fault tolerance thresholds-usually by identifying a privileged resource, such as an entangling gate or a non-Clifford operation, and then deriving the noise levels required to make it 'unprivileged'. In this work, we consider extensions of this approach where noise is added to Clifford gates too and then 'commuted' around until it concentrates on attacking the non-Clifford resource. While commuting noise around is not always straightforward, we find that easy instances can be identified in popular fault tolerance proposals, thereby enabling sharper upper bounds to be derived in these cases. For instance we find that if we take Knill's (2005 Nature 434 39) fault tolerance proposal together with the ability to prepare any possible state in the XY plane of the Bloch sphere, then not more than 3.69% error-per-gate noise is sufficient to make it classical, and 13.71% of Knill's noise model is sufficient. These bounds have been derived without noise being added to the decoding parts of the circuits. Introducing such noise in a toy example suggests that the present approach can be optimized further to yield tighter bounds
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