Quantum turnstile operation of single-molecule magnets

The time-dependent transport through single-molecule magnets coupled to magnetic or non-magnetic electrodes is studied in the framework of the generalized master equation method. We investigate the transient regime induced by the periodic switching of the source and drain contacts. If the electrodes have opposite magnetizations the quantum turnstile operation allows the stepwise writing of intermediate excited states. In turn, the transient currents provide a way to read these states. Within our approach we take into account both the uniaxial and transverse anisotropy. The latter may induce additional quantum tunneling processes which affect the efficiency of the proposed read-and-write scheme. An equally weighted mixture of molecular spin states can be prepared if one of the electrodes is ferromagnetic.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure

Vacuum refractive indices and helicity flip in strong-field QED

Vacuum birefringence is governed by the amplitude for a photon to flip helicity or polarisation state in an external field. Here we calculate the flip and non-flip amplitudes in arbitrary plane wave backgrounds, along with the induced spacetime-dependent refractive indices of the vacuum. We compare the behaviour of the amplitudes in the low energy and high energy regimes, and analyse the impact of pulse shape and energy. We also provide the first lightfront-QED derivation of the coefficients in the Heisenberg-Euler effective action.Comment: Version 2: additional results added, including discussion of vacuum refractive indices, analysis of flip and non-flip ampltidues at high-energy, additional plots, new title. Now 17 pages, 10 figure

Photon polarization in light-by-light scattering: Finite size effects

We derive a simple expression for the photon helicity and polarization-flip probabilities in arbitrary background fields, in the low-energy regime. Taking the background to model a focused laser beam, we study the impact of pulse shape and collision geometry on the probabilities and on ellipticity signals of vacuum birefringence. We find that models which do not account for pulse duration can overestimate all signals in near head-on collisions by up to an order of magnitude. Taking pulse duration into account, the flip probability becomes relatively insensitive to both angular incidence and the fine details of the pulse structure