Bloch Oscillations of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen States

Bloch Oscillations (BOs) of quantum particles manifest themselves as periodic spreading and re-localization of the associated wave functions when traversing lattice potentials subject to external gradient forces. Albeit BOs are deeply rooted into the very foundations of quantum mechanics, all experimental observations of this phenomenon so far have only contemplated dynamics of one or two particles initially prepared in separable local states, which is well described by classical wave physics. Evidently, a more general description of genuinely quantum BOs will be achieved upon excitation of a Bloch-oscillator lattice system by nonlocal states, that is, containing correlations in contradiction with local realism. Here we report the first experimental observation of BOs of two-particle Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen states (EPR), whose associated N-particle wave functions are nonlocal by nature. The time evolution of two-photon EPR states in Bloch-oscillators, whether symmetric, antisymmetric or partially symmetric, reveals unexpected transitions from particle antibunching to bunching. Consequently, the initial state can be tailored to produce spatial correlations akin to bosons, fermions or anyons. These results pave the way for a wider class of photonic quantum simulators.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure

Generalized Schr\"odinger cat states and their classical emulation

We demonstrate that superpositions of coherent and displaced Fock states, also referred to as generalized Schr\"odinger cats cats, can be created by application of a nonlinear displacement operator which is a deformed version of the Glauber displacement operator. Consequently, such generalized cat states can be formally considered as nonlinear coherent states. We then show that Glauber-Fock photonic lattices endowed with alternating positive and negative coupling coefficients give rise to classical analogs of such cat states. In addition, it is pointed out that the analytic propagator of these deformed Glauber-Fock arrays explicitly contains the Wigner operator opening the possibility to observe Wigner functions of the quantum harmonic oscillator in the classical domain.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Perfect transfer of path-entangled photons in J(x) photonic lattices

We demonstrate that perfect transfer of path-entangled photons as well as of single-photon states is possible in a certain class of spin inspired optical systems-the so-called J(x) photonic lattices. In these fully integrable optical arrangements, perfect cyclic transitions from correlated states to totally anticorrelated states can naturally occur. Moreover we show that the bunching and antibunching response of path-entangled photons can be preengineered at will in such coupled optical arrangements. We elucidate these effects via pertinent examples

Two-particle quantum correlations in stochastically-coupled networks

Quantum walks in dynamically-disordered networks have become an invaluable tool for understanding the physics of open quantum systems. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to describe the dynamics of indistinguishable particles in noisy quantum networks. By making use of stochastic calculus, we derive a master equation for the propagation of two non-interacting correlated particles in tight-binding networks affected by off-diagonal dynamical disorder. We show that the presence of noise in the couplings of a quantum network creates a pure-dephasing-like process that destroys all coherences in the single-particle Hilbert subspace. Remarkably, we find that when two or more correlated particles propagate in the network, coherences accounting for particle indistinguishability are robust against the impact of noise, thus showing that it is possible, in principle, to find specific conditions for which many indistinguishable particles can traverse dynamically-disordered systems without losing their ability to interfere. These results shed light on the role of particle indistinguishability in the preservation of quantum coherence in dynamically-disordered quantum networks.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure