Theoretical and Computational Physics

This study examines how a quantum switch can affect thermodynamics. A quantum switch allows two processes to happen in different orders at the same time. When applied to heating and cooling processes, it showed surprising results that seemed to break a fundamental law of thermodynamics. The researchers found that this switching could improve how much information can be transferred. Using advanced experimental techniques, they confirmed the limits of this information increase and showed that, in some cases, those limits can be exceeded. Importantly, the quantum switch can change a heated state into a cooler one while using some energy from a control system. This research suggests new ways to explore quantum mechanics and thermodynamics together.

Read more at Physical Review Letters:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.040401

The Chern number has been widely used to describe the topological properties of periodic structures in momentum space. Here, we introduce a real-space spin Chern number for the optical near fields of finite-sized structures. This new spin Chern number is intrinsically quantized and equal to the structure’s Euler characteristic. The relationship is robust against continuous deformation of the structure’s geometry and is irrelevant to the specific material constituents or external excitation. Our Letter enriches topological physics by extending the Chern number to real space, opening exciting possibilities for exploring the real-space topological properties of light.

Read more at Physical Review Letters:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.233801

We present a microscopic theory for nonlinear optical spectroscopy of N molecules in an optical cavity. Using the Heisenberg-Langevin equation, an analytical expression is derived for the time- and frequency-resolved signals accounting for arbitrary numbers of vibrational excitations. We identify clear signatures of the polariton-polaron interaction from multidimensional projections of the signal, e.g., pathways and timescales. Cooperative dynamics of cavity polaritons against intramolecular vibrations is revealed, along with a crosstalk between long-range coherence and vibronic coupling that may lead to localization effects. Our results further characterize the polaritonic coherence and the population transfer that is slower.

Read more at Physical Review Letters:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.103001

The central idea of metamaterials and metaoptics is that, besides their base materials, the geometry of structures offers a broad extra dimension to explore for exotic functionalities. Here, we discover that the topology of structures fundamentally dictates the topological properties of optical fields and offers a new dimension to exploit for optical functionalities that are irrelevant to specific material constituents or structural geometries. We find that the nontrivial topology of metal structures ensures the birth of polarization singularities (PSs) in the near field with rich morphologies and intriguing spatial evolutions including merging, bifurcation, and topological transition. By mapping the PSs to non-Hermitian exceptional points and using homotopy theory, we extract the core invariant that governs the topological classification of the PSs and the conservation law that regulates their spatial evolutions. The results bridge singular optics, topological photonics, and non-Hermitian physics, with potential applications in chiral sensing, chiral quantum optics, and beyond photonics in other wave systems.

Read more at Science Advances:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq0910

The search for a sweet spot, the locus in qubit parameters where quantum control is first-order insensitive to noises, is key to achieve high-fidelity quantum gates. Efforts to search for such a sweet spot in conventional double-quantum-dot singlet-triplet qubits where each dot hosts one electron (“two-electron singlet-triplet qubit”), especially for two-qubit operations, have been unsuccessful. Here we consider singlet-triplet qubits allowing each dot to host more than one electron, with a total of four electrons in the double quantum dots (“four-electron singlet-triplet qubit”). We theoretically demonstrate, using configuration interaction calculations, that sweet spots appear in this coupled qubit system. We further demonstrate that, under realistic charge noise and hyperfine noise, a two-qubit operation at the proposed sweet spot could offer gate fidelities (∼99%) that are higher than the conventional two-electron singlet-triplet qubit system (∼90%). Our results should facilitate realization of high-fidelity two-qubit gates in singlet-triplet qubit systems.

Read more at Physical Review B:
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.106.075417

We study many-body localization (MBL) for interacting one-dimensional lattice fermions in random (Anderson) and quasiperiodic (Aubry-Andre) models, focusing on the role of interaction range. We obtain the MBL quantum phase diagrams by calculating the experimentally relevant inverse participation ratio (IPR) at half-filling using exact diagonalization methods and extrapolating to the infinite system size. For short-range interactions, our results produce in the phase diagram a qualitative symmetry between weak and strong interaction limits. For long-range interactions, no such symmetry exists as the strongly interacting system is always many-body localized, independent of the effective disorder strength, and the system is analogous to a pinned Wigner crystal. We obtain various scaling exponents for the IPR, suggesting conditions for different MBL regimes arising from interaction effects.

Read more at Physical Review Letters:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.146601