Sensitive quantum particles

The quantum mechanical entanglement of particles plays an important role in many technical applications. To date, however, the effect has been difficult to measure experimentally.

Physicists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the University of Innsbruck and the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona have now developed a new protocol to detect entanglement of many-particle quantum states using established measuring methods.

In quantum theory, interactions between particles create fascinating correlations known as entanglement. They cannot be explained by any means known to the classical world.

Entanglement is a consequence of the probabilistic rules of quantum mechanics and seems to permit a peculiar instantaneous connection between particles over long distances that defies the laws of our macroscopic world – a phenomenon that Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.”

Developing protocols to detect and quantify entanglement of many-particle quantum states is a key challenge for current experiments because entanglement becomes very difficult to study when many particles are involved. “We are able to control smaller particle ensembles well, where we can measure entanglement in a relatively straight forward way,” says quantum physicist Philipp Hauke. However, “when we are dealing with a large system of entangled particles, this measurement is extremely complex or rather impossible because the resources required scale exponentially with the system size.

”Markus Heyl from the Technical University of Munich, Philipp Hauke and Peter Zoller from the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with Luca Tagliacozzo from the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona (Spain) have found a new way to detect certain properties of many-particle entanglement independent of the size of the system and by using standard measurement tools.

Entanglement measurable via susceptibility

 

“When dealing with more complex systems, scientists had to carry out a large number of measurements to detect and quantify entanglement between many particles,” says Philipp Hauke. “Our protocol avoids this problem and can also be used for determining entanglement in macroscopic objects, which was nearly impossible until now.”

Using this new method, physicists can employ tools already well established experimentally. In their study published in Nature Physics the team of researchers gives explicit examples to demonstrate its framework: The entanglement of many-particle systems trapped in optical lattices can be determined using laser spectroscopy while the well-established technique of neutron scattering is utilized for measuring entanglement in solid-state systems.

The physicists successfully demonstrated that the quantum Fisher information, which can provide reliable proof for genuine multipartite entanglement, is in fact measurable. The researchers emphasize that entanglement can be detected by measuring the dynamic response of a system to a perturbation, which can be determined by comparing individual measurements.

“For example, when we move a sample through a time-dependent magnetic field, we can determine the system’s susceptibility towards the magnetic field through the measurement data and thereby detect and quantify internal entanglement,” explains Hauke.

Manifold applications

 

Quantum metrology, i.e. measurement techniques with increased precision exploiting quantum mechanics, is not the only important field of application of this protocol. It will also provide new perspectives for quantum simulations, where quantum entanglement is used as a resource for studying properties of quantum systems.

In solid-state physics, the protocol may be employed to investigate the role of entanglement in many-body systems, thereby providing a deeper understanding of quantum matter. The research work was supported by the European Community, the European Research Council (ERC), the Austrian Science Fund, the Spanish Government and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Publication:

Measuring multipartite entanglement via dynamic susceptibilities. Philipp Hauke, Markus Heyl, Luca Tagliacozzo, Peter Zoller. Advanced Online Publication, Nature Physics, on 21 March 2016. - DOI: 10.1038/nphys3700

Technical University of Munich

Nanoscale cavity strongly links quantum particles

Scientists have created a crystal structure that boosts the interaction between tiny bursts of light and individual electrons, an advance that could be a significant step toward establishing quantum networks in the future.

Today’s networks use electronic circuits to store information and optical fibers to carry it, and quantum networks may benefit from a similar framework. Such networks would transmit qubits – quantum versions of ordinary bits – from place to place and would offer unbreakable security for the transmitted information. But researchers must first develop ways for qubits that are better at storing information to interact with individual packets of light called photons that are better at transporting it, a task achieved in conventional networks by electro-optic modulators that use electronic signals to modulate properties of light.

Now, researchers in the group of Edo Waks, a fellow at JQI and an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, have struck upon an interface between photons and single electrons that makes progress toward such a device. By pinning a photon and an electron together in a small space, the electron can quickly change the quantum properties of the photon and vice versa. The research was reported online Feb. 8 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“Our platform has two major advantages over previous work,” says Shuo Sun, a graduate student at JQI and the first author of the paper. “The first is that the electronic qubit is integrated on a chip, which makes the approach very scalable. The second is that the interactions between light and matter are fast. They happen in only a trillionth of a second – 1,000 times faster than previous studies.”

CONSTRUCTING AN INTERFACE

The new interface utilizes a well-studied structure known as a photonic crystal to guide and trap light. These crystals are built from microscopic assemblies of thin semiconductor layers and a grid of carefully drilled holes. By choosing the size and location of the holes, researchers can control the properties of the light traveling through the crystal, even creating a small cavity where photons can get trapped and bounce around.

”These photonic crystals can concentrate light in an extremely small volume, allowing devices to operate at the fundamental quantum limit where a single photon can make a big difference,” says Waks.

The results also rely on previous studies of how small, engineered nanocrystals called quantum dots can manipulate light. These tiny regions behave as artificial atoms and can also trap electrons in a tight space. Prior work from the JQI group showed that quantum dots could alter the properties of many photons and rapidly switch the direction of a beam of light.

The new experiment combines the light-trapping of photonic crystals with the electron-trapping of quantum dots. The group used a photonic crystal punctuated by holes just 72 nanometers wide, but left three holes undrilled in one region of the crystal. This created a defect in the regular grid of holes that acted like a cavity, and only those photons with only a certain energy could enter and leave.

Inside this cavity, embedded in layers of semiconductors, a quantum dot held one electron. The spin of that electron – a quantum property of the particle that is analogous to the motion of a spinning top – controlled what happened to photons injected into the cavity by a laser. If the spin pointed up, a photon entered the cavity and left it unchanged. But when the spin pointed down, any photon that entered the cavity came out with a reversed polarization – the direction that light’s electric field points. The interaction worked the opposite way, too: A single photon prepared with a certain polarization could flip the electron’s spin.

Both processes are examples of quantum switches, which modify the qubits stored by the electron and photon in a controlled way. Such switches will be the coin of the realm for proposed future quantum computers and quantum networks.

QUANTUM NETWORKING

Those networks could take advantage of the strengths that photons and electrons offer as qubits. In the future, for instance, electrons could be used to store and process quantum information at one location, while photons could shuttle that information between different parts of the network.

Such links could enable the distribution of entanglement, the enigmatic connection that groups of distantly separated qubits can share. And that entanglement could enable other tasks, such as performing distributed quantum computations, teleporting qubits over great distances or establishing secret keys that two parties could use to communicate securely.

Before that, though, Sun says that the light-matter interface that he and his colleagues have created must create entanglement between the electron and photon qubits, a process that will require more accurate measurements to definitively demonstrate.

“The ultimate goal will be integrating photon creation and routing onto the chip itself,” Sun says. “In that manner we might be able to create more complicated quantum devices and quantum circuits.”

In addition to Waks and Sun, the paper has two additional co-authors: Glenn Solomon, a JQI fellow, and Hyochul Kim, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland.

Joint Quantum Institute

Quantum Temperature

Copyright: TU WIEN.Atomchip zum Kühlen und
Manipulieren der ultrakalten Atomwolken.

Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology manage to study the physics that connect the classical the quantum world. How does a classical temperature form in the quantum world? 

An experiment at the Vienna University of Technology has directly observed the emergence and the spreading of a temperature in a quantum system. Remarkably, the quantum properties are lost, even though the quantum system is completely isolated and not connected to the outside world. The experimental results are being published in this week’s issue of “Nature Physics”.

Quantum and Classical Physics: From the Microscopic to the Macroscopic World

The connection between the microscopic world of quantum physics and our everyday experience, which is concerned with much larger objects, still remains puzzling. When a quantum system is measured, it is inevitably disturbed and some of its quantum properties are lost.

A cloud of atoms, for example, can be prepared in such away that each atom is simultaneously located at two different places, forming a perfect quantum superposition. As soon as the location of the atoms is measured, however, this superposition is destroyed. All that is left are atoms sitting at some well-defined places. They behave just as classical objects would.

In this case, the transition from quantum behavior to classical behavior is initiated by the measurement – a contact with the outside world. But what happens, if a quantum system is not influenced from the outside at all? Can classical properties still emerge?

Disorder in the Quantum World

“We are studying clouds consisting of several thousand atoms”, explains Tim Langen, lead author of the study from Professor Jörg Schmiedmayer’s research team at Vienna University of Technology. “Such a cloud is small enough to effectively isolate it from the rest of the world, but it is large enough to study how quantum properties are lost”.

In the experiment, the atom clouds are split into two halves. After a certain time the two halves are compared to each other. In that way, the scientists can measure the amount of quantum mechanical connection between the clouds. Initially, this connection is perfect; all atoms are in a highly ordered quantum state. But as the cloud is a large object consisting of thousands of particles, this order does not remain for long.

Loss of Quantum Properties Without Influence From Outside

As the atoms interact with each other, disorder begins to spread with a certain velocity. Atoms in the already disordered regions lose their quantum properties. A temperature can be assigned to them – just as in a classical gas. “The velocity with which the disorder spreads depends on the number of atoms”, says Tim Langen. This defines a clear border between the regions which can be described by a classical temperature and regions where quantum properties remain unchanged.

After a certain time the disorder has spread over the whole cloud. The remarkable observation is that this loss of quantum properties happens just because of quantum effects inside the atom cloud, without any influence from the outside world. “So far, such a behavior had only been conjectured, but our experiments demonstrate that nature really behaves like this”, Jörg Schmiedmayer points out.

Atomic Clouds: A World on its Own

In a way, the atomic cloud behaves like its own miniature universe. It is isolated from the environment, so its behavior is solely determined by its internal properties. Starting with a completely quantum mechanical state, the cloud looks “classical” after some time, even though it evolves according to the laws of quantum physics. That is why the experiment could not just help us to understand the behavior of large atom clouds, it could also help to explain, why the world that we experience every day looks so classical, even though it is governed by quantum laws.

Picture Download: http://www.tuwien.ac.at/dle/pr/aktuelles/downloads/2013/quantentemperatur

Further Information:
Dipl.-Phys. Tim Langen
Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics,
Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ)
Vienna University of Technology
Stadionallee 2, 1020 Wien
T: +43-1-58801-141874
tim.langen(at)tuwien.ac.at

Prof. Jörg Schmiedmayer
Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics,
Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ)
Vienna University of Technology
Stadionallee 2, 1020 Wien
T: +43-1-58801-141801
hannes-joerg.schmiedmayer(at)tuwien.ac.at
schmiedmayer(at)AtomChip.org

Source: http://vcq.quantum.at/news/news/detail/444.html