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Non-Hermitian systems, with symmetric or antisymmetric Hamiltonians under the parity-time (PT) operations, can have entirely real or imaginary eigenvalues. This fact has led to surprising discoveries such as loss-induced lasing and topological energy transfer. A merit of anti-PT systems is free of gain, but in recent efforts on making anti-PT devices, nonlinearity is still required. Here, counterintuitively, we show how to achieve anti-PT symmetry and its spontaneous breaking in a linear device by spinning a lossy resonator. Compared with a Hermitian spinning device, significantly enhanced optical isolation and ultrasensitive nanoparticle sensing are achievable in the anti-PT-broken phase. In a broader view, our work provides a new tool to study anti-PT physics, with such a wide range of applications as anti-PT lasers, anti-PT gyroscopes, and anti-PT topological photonics or optomechanics.

Multiqubit entanglement is extremely important to perform truly secure quantum optical communication and computing operations. However, the efficient generation of long-range entanglement over extended time periods between multiple qubits randomly distributed in a photonic system remains an outstanding challenge. This constraint is mainly due to the detrimental effects of decoherence and dephasing. To alleviate this issue, we present engineered epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) nanostructures that can maximize the coherence of light-matter interactions at room temperature. We investigate a practical ENZ plasmonic waveguide system which simultaneously achieves multiqubit entanglement in elongated distances, extended time periods, and, even more importantly, independent of the emitters positions. More specifically, we present efficient transient entanglement between three and four optical qubits mediated by ENZ with results that can be easily generalized to an arbitrary number of emitters. The entanglement between multiple qubits is characterized by computing the negativity metric applied for the first time to the proposed nanophotonic ENZ configuration. The ENZ response is found to be substantially advantageous to boost the coherence between multiple emitters compared to alternative plasmonic waveguide schemes. Finally, the superradiance collective emission response at the ENZ resonance is utilized to design a new high fidelity two-qubit quantum phase gate that can be used in various emerging quantum computing applications.

Multi-qubit entanglement is of paramount importance to perform truly secure quantum optical communication operations. In this work, we present efficient long-range entanglement mediated by plasmonic waveguides operating at their cut-off frequency, where they exhibit an effective epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) response. Only the excited ENZ mode at plasmonic waveguides has a strong and homogeneous electric field distribution compared to different modes excited at groove and rod waveguides, resulting in an efficient two- and multi-qubit entanglement that can persist over extended time periods and long distances. Efficient multipartite entanglement from three equidistantly arranged two-level quantum emitters (qubits) inside the ENZ waveguide is also demonstrated by using three different multi-qubit entanglement criterions, i.e., pairwise concurrence, negativity, and genuine multipartite entanglement. The findings of this work stress the importance of ENZ plasmonic waveguides as an ideal nanophotonic platform to support efficient quantum optical effects.

The resonance energy transfer and entanglement between two-level quantum emitters are typically limited to sub-wavelength distances due to the inherently short-range nature of the dipole-dipole interactions. Moreover, the entanglement of quantum systems is hard to preserve for a long time period due to decoherence and dephasing mainly caused by radiative and nonradiative losses. In this work, we outperform the aforementioned limitations by presenting efficient long-range inter-emitter entanglement and large enhancement of resonance energy transfer between two optical qubits mediated by epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) and other plasmonic waveguide types, such as V-shaped grooves and cylindrical nanorods. More importantly, we explicitly demonstrate that the ENZ waveguide resonant energy transfer and entanglement performance drastically outperforms the other waveguide systems. Only the excited ENZ mode has an infinite phase velocity combined with a strong and homogeneous electric field distribution, which leads to a giant energy transfer and efficient entanglement independent of the emitters' separation distances and nanoscale positions in the ENZ nanowaveguide, an advantageous feature that can potentially accommodate multi-qubit entanglement. Moreover, the transient entanglement can be further improved and become almost independent of the detrimental decoherence effect when an optically active (gain) medium is embedded inside the ENZ waveguide. We also present that efficient steady-state entanglement can be achieved by using a coherent external pumping scheme. Finally, we report a practical way to detect the steady-state entanglement by computing the second-order correlation function. The presented findings stress the importance of plasmonic ENZ waveguides in the design of the envisioned on-chip quantum communication and information processing plasmonic nanodevices.

Topological quantum memories in two dimensions are not thermally stable, since once a quasiparticle excitation is created, it will delocalise at no energy cost. This places an upper bound on the lifetime of quantum information stored in them. We address this issue for a topological subsystem code introduced in [Bravyi S. et al., Quant.Inf.Comp.13(11):0963]. By frequently measuring the gauge operators of the code, a technique known as Operator Quantum Zeno Effect [Li Y. et al, preprint arXiv:1305.2464], the dynamics responsible for quasiparticle motion is suppressed, and can eventually be "frozen" in the large frequency limit. A feature of this method is that the density operator of the code does not commute with the measurement operators, so the density matrix will be randomised after a few measurements. However the logical operators commute with the measurement operators and are thus protected., 14 pages, 3 figures

The indium ion (115In+) is one of the candidates for the single-ion optical clock with fractional frequency uncertainties in the 10−18 level proposed by Hans Dehmelt in 1980s. One of the first attempts for the realization has been started by the research group by Herbert Walther in Garching already in the late of 1980s. The first frequency measurement was published in 2001 [1], followed by two reports in 2007 [2, 3]. Unfortunately, there have been no updates since then, and the discrepancy of about 1 kHz in the reported frequencies is left unresolved. In the meanwhile the implementation with 27Al+ demonstrated the predicted fractional uncertainties in the 10−18 level. Recent theoretical calculations suggest that similar frequency uncertainties should be achieved with In+ and that enhanced frequency stability could be implemented by use of multiple In+ ions [4]. As the first step towards these goals we report on a new frequency measurement of the clock transition of In+ [5].

Continuous spontaneous localisation (CSL) is a model that captures the effects of a class of extensions to quantum theory which are expected to result from quantum gravity, and is such that wavefunction collapse is a physical process. The rate of such a process could be very much lower than the upper bounds set by searches to date, and yet still modify greatly the interpretation of quantum mechanics and solve the quantum measurement problem. Consequently experiments are sought to explore this. We describe an experiment that has the potential to extend sensitivity to CSL by many orders of magnitude. The method is to detect heating of the motion of charged macroscopic objects confined in a Paul trap. We discuss the detection and the chief noise sources. We find that CSL with standard parameters could be observed using a vibration-isolated ion trap of size 1 cm at ultra-low pressure, with optical interferometric detection., 5 pages, 2 figures

An important approach to the fault-tolerant quantum computation is protecting the logical information using the quantum error correction. Usually, the logical information is in the form of logical qubits, which are encoded in physical qubits using quantum error correction codes. Compared with the qubit quantum computation, the fermionic quantum computation has advantages in quantum simulations of fermionic systems, e.g. molecules. In this paper, we show that the fermionic quantum computation can be universal and fault-tolerant if we encode logical Majorana fermions in physical Majorana fermions. We take a color code as an example to demonstrate the universal set of fault-tolerant operations on logical Majorana fermions, and we numerically find that the fault-tolerance threshold is about 0.8%., Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures and 1 table; Version 2: References are updated

At the nanoscale, chemistry can happen quite differently due to mechanical forces selectively breaking the chemical bonds of materials. The interaction between chemistry and mechanical forces can be classified as mechanochemistry. An example of archetypal mechanochemistry occurs at the nanoscale in anisotropic detonating of a broad class of layered energetic molecular crystals bonded by inter-layer van der Waals (vdW) interactions. Here, we introduce an ab initio study of the collision, in which quantum molecular dynamic simulations of binary collisions between energetic vdW crystallites, TATB molecules, reveal atomistic mechanisms of anisotropic shock sensitivity. The highly sensitive lateral collision was found to originate from the twisting and bending to breaking of nitro-groups mediated by strong intra-layer hydrogen bonds. This causes the closing of the electronic energy gap due to an inverse Jahn–Teller effect. On the other hand, the insensitive collisions normal to multilayers are accomplished by more delocalized molecular deformations mediated by inter-layer interactions. Our nano-collision studies provide a much needed atomistic understanding for the rational design of insensitive energetic nanomaterials and the detonation synthesis of novel nanomaterials.

In this study, we reanalyze the magnetic interactions in the Kitaev spin liquid candidate materials Na$_2$IrO$_3$, $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$, and $\alpha$-Li$_2$IrO$_3$ using nonperturbative exact diagonalization methods. These methods are more appropriate given the relatively itinerant nature of the systems suggested in previous works. We treat all interactions up to third neighbours on equal footing. The computed terms reveal significant long range coupling, bond-anisotropy, and/or off-diagonal couplings which we argue naturally explain the observed ordered phases in these systems. Given these observations, the potential for realizing the spin-liquid state in real materials is analyzed, and synthetic challenges are defined and explained.

Fault-tolerant quantum computing in systems composed of both Majorana fermions and topologically unprotected quantum systems, e.g. superconducting circuits or quantum dots, is studied in this paper. Errors caused by topologically unprotected quantum systems need to be corrected with error correction schemes, for instance, the surface code. We find that the error-correction performance of such a hybrid topological quantum computer is not superior to a normal quantum computer unless the topological charge of Majorana fermions is insusceptible to noise. If errors changing the topological charge are rare, the fault-tolerance threshold is much higher than the threshold of a normal quantum computer, and a surface-code logical qubit could be encoded in only tens of topological qubits instead of about a thousand normal qubits., 15 pages, 11 figures

Observation of photonic spin Hall effect (SHE) near the phase singularity at dielectric metasurfaces is presented. The structured metasurface works as a space-variant Pancharatnam-Berry phase element and produces a vortex beam with phase singularity. The dynamical vortex phase is introduced to eliminate or enhance the phase singularity, thus realizing the manipulation of spin-dependent Pancharatnam-Berry phase. The spin-orbit coupling near the singularity of the Pancharatnam-Berry phase leads to the observation of the photonic SHE which manifests itself as spin-dependent splitting. The underlying mechanism is significantly different from previously reported cases. It thereby provides an alternative way to manipulate the spin states of photons.

We give a full investigation on the dynamics of power-law kinetic quintessence $L(X, \phi)=V(\phi)(-X+X^2)$ by considering the potential related parameter $\Gamma$($=\frac{V V''}{V'^2}$) as a function of another potential parameter $\lambda$($=\frac{V'}{\kappa V^{3/2}}$), which correspondingly extends the analysis of the dynamical system of our universe from two-dimension to three-dimension. Beside the critical points found in previous papers, we find a new de-Sitter-like dominant attractor(\textit{cp$6$}) and give its stable condition using the center manifold theorem. For the dark energy dominant solution(\textit{cp$6$} and \textit{cp$7$}), it could be distinguished from canonical quintessence and tachyon models since the sound speed $c_s^2=0$ or $c_s^2\ll 1$. For the scaling solution (\textit{cp$8$}), it is very interesting that the sound speed $c_s^2=1/5$ while it behaves as ordinary matter. We therefore point out that the power-law kinetic quintessence should have different signatures on cold dark matter power spectrum and cosmic microwave background both at early time when this scalar field is an early dark energy with $\Omega_\phi$ being non-negligible at high redshift and at late time when it drives the accelerating expansion. We even do not know whether there are any degeneracies of the impacts between these two epoches. They are expected to be investigated in future., Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, accepted by Physical Review D, in press

We construct two spin models on lattices (both two and three-dimensional) to study the capability of quantum computational power as a function of temperature and the system parameter. There exists a finite region in the phase diagram such that the thermal equilibrium states are capable of providing a universal fault-tolerant resource for measurement-based quantum computation. Moreover, in such a region the thermal resource states on the 3D lattices can enable topological protection for quantum computation. The two models behave similarly in terms of quantum computational power. However, they have different properties in terms of the usual phase transitions. The first model has a first-order phase transition only at zero temperature whereas there is no transition at all in the second model. Interestingly, the transition in the quantum computational power does not coincide with the phase transition in the first model., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, close to published version

A cluster state cannot be a unique ground state of a two-body interacting Hamiltonian. Here, we propose the creation of a cluster state of logical qubits encoded in spin-1/2 particles by adiabatically weakening two-body interactions. The proposal is valid for any spatial dimensional cluster states. Errors induced by thermal fluctuations and adiabatic evolution within finite time can be eliminated ensuring fault-tolerant quantum computing schemes., title updated, introduction and discussions sections updated

The time evolution of some quantum states can be slowed down or even stopped under frequent measurements. This is the usual quantum Zeno effect. Here, we report an operator quantum Zeno effect, in which the evolution of some physical observables is slowed down through measurements even though the quantum state changes randomly with time. Based on the operator quantum Zeno effect, we show how we can protect quantum information from decoherence with two-qubit measurements, realizable with noisy two-qubit interactions., Comment: accepted by Phys. Rev. Lett

In this paper, we show that the quantum Zeno effect can occur for generalized quantum measurements or operations. As a consequence of frequently performing nonselective measurements (or trace-preserving completely positive maps), the evolution of a certain measurement-invariant state is governed by an effective Hamiltonian defined by the measurement (or map) and the free-evolution Hamiltonian. For selective measurements, the state may change randomly with time according to measurement outcomes, but some physical quantities (operators) still evolve according to the effective Hamiltonian. NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore) MOE (Min. of Education, S’pore) Published version

We study an initially inverted three-level atom in the lambda configuration embedded in a waveguide, interacting with a propagating single-photon pulse. Depending on the temporal shape of the pulse, the system behaves either as an optimal universal cloning machine, or as a highly efficient deterministic source of maximally entangled photon pairs. This quantum transistor operates over a wide range of frequencies, and can be implemented with today's solid-state technologies., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

We calculate the tree and penguin amplitudes in the B 0 ! + decay channel employing the per- turbative QCD factorization approach. Using the amplitudes as input with the theoretical uncertainties sucien tly considered, we constrain the UT angle to 53 6 6 70 , from the measurements of the CP violation parameters C + and S + in B 0 ! + . The U-spin breaking eect between B 0 ! + and B 0 ! K + K is estimated to be around 30%.

The nonlinear propagation of ion-acoustic waves is theoretically reported in a collisional plasma containing strongly coupled ions and nonthermal electrons featuring Tsallis distribution. For this purpose, the nonlinear integro-differential form of the generalized hydrodynamic model is used to investigate the strong-coupling effect. The modified complex Ginzburg–Landau equation with a linear dissipative term is derived for the potential wave amplitude in the hydrodynamic regime, and the modulation instability of ion-acoustic waves is examined. When the dissipative effect is neglected, the modified complex Ginzburg–Landau equation reduces to the nonlinear Schrodinger equation. Within the unstable region, two different types of second-order ion-acoustic rogue waves including single peak type and rogue wave triplets are discussed. The effect of the plasma parameters on the rogue waves is also presented.

We describe a simple entangling principle based on the scattering of photons off single emitters in one-dimensional waveguides (or extremely-lossy cavities). The scheme can be applied to photonic qubits encoded in polarization or time-bin, and features a filtering mechanism that works effectively as a built-in error-correction directive. This automatically maps imperfections from weak couplings, atomic decay into undesired modes, frequency mismatches, or finite bandwidths of the incident photonic pulses, into heralded losses instead of infidelities. The scheme is thus adequate for high-fidelity maximally entangling gates even in the weak-coupling regime. These, in turn, can be directly applied to store and retrieve photonic-qubit states, thereby completing an atom-photon interface toolbox, or to sequential measurement-based quantum computations with atomic memories., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures

A non-Hermitian PT-symmetric system can have full real spectrum but does not ensure probability preserving time evolution, in contrast to that of a Hermitian system. We present a non-Hermitian two-band model, which is comprised of dimerized hopping terms and staggered imaginary on-site potentials, and study the dynamics in the exact PT-symmetric phase based on the exact solution. It is shown that an initial state, which does not involve two equal-momentum-vector eigenstates in different bands, obeys perfectly probability-preserving time evolution in terms of the Dirac inner product. Beyond this constriction, the quasi-Hermitian dynamical behaviors, such as non-spreading propagation and fractional revival of a Gaussian wave packet, are also observed., 8 pages, 14 figures

We present a protocol for generating entanglement over long distances in a two-dimensional quantum network based on the surface error-correction code. This protocol requires a fixed number of quantum memories at each node of the network and tolerates error rates of up to 1.67% in the quantum channels., Comment: 5 pags, 4 figs. V2: text corrected, discussion on channel losses added. Accepted by PRA

Based on the obtained exact results we systematically study the quench dynamics of a one-dimensional spin-1/2 transverse field Ising model with zero- and finite-temperature initial states. We focus on the magnetization of the system after a sudden change of the external field and a coherent time-evolution process. With a zero-temperature initial state, the quench magnetic susceptibility as a function of the initial field strength exhibits strongly similar scaling behaviors to those of the static magnetic susceptibility, and the quench magnetic susceptibility as a function of the final field strength shows a discontinuity at the quantum critical point. This discontinuity remains robust and always occurs at the quantum critical point even for the case of finite-temperature initial systems, which indicates a great advantage of employing quench dynamics to study quantum phase transitions., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

We use the two-atom concurrence and the visibility of interference fringes of photons to characterize a quantum phase transition for a hybrid system consisting of an array of coupled cavities and each cavity doped with a two-level atom. We compare them with the total excitation number fluctuation. Analytical and numerical simulation results show quantum critical phenomena similar to the Mott insulator to superfluid transition. Here, the contour lines of the atomic concurrence, the visibility of interference fringes of photons, and the excitation number fluctuation in the phase diagram are consistent in the vicinity of the nonanalytic locus of the atomic concurrence.

In this paper, we investigate the solitary wave propagation through the nonlinear periodic structure that consists of alternating layers of both positive and negative Kerr nonlinear coefficients along the propagation direction, in which the pulse dynamics is governed by the nonlinear coupled mode (NLCM) equations. Using the multiple scale analysis, the NLCM equations are reduced into the perturbed nonlinear Schrodinger (PNLS) type equation, which incorporates both the higher order dispersive effects and self-steepening effect. From the PNLS equation, dark solitary solutions have been constructed by an extended Tanh-function expansion method. The effects of the physical parameters for nonlinear periodic structure on soliton propagation are discussed.

We systematically study the transfer of quantum state of electron spin as the flying qubit along a half-filled Peierls distorted tight-binding chain described by the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, which behaves as a quantum data bus. This enables a novel physical mechanism for quantum communication with always-on interaction: the effective hopping of the spin carrier between sites $A$ and $B$ connected to two sites in this SSH chain can be induced by the quasi-excitations of the SSH model. As we prove, it is the Peierls energy gap of the SSH quasi-excitations that plays a crucial role to protect the robustness of the quantum state transfer process. Moreover, our observation also indicates that such a scheme can also be employed to explore the intrinsic property of the quantum system., 10 pages, 6 figures

Motivated by the recent measurement on the upper limit of B-0 -> J/psi D branching ratio, we investigate the B-0 -> J/psi D-(star) and eta D-c((star)) decays in the framework of k(T) factorization. We find that these pure annihilation (W-exchange) decays possess branching ratios of the order 10(-5)similar to 10(-7), which are just at the corner of being observable at the current running B factories. The measurements of these decay channels may help us to understand the QCD dynamics in the corresponding energy scale, and, especially, the distribution amplitudes of charmonium.

We show that a perfect quantum state transmission can be realized through a spin chain possessing a commensurate structure of energy spectrum, which is matched with the corresponding parity. As an exposition of the mirror inversion symmetry discovered by Albanese et. al (quant-ph/0405029), the parity matched the commensurability of energy spectra help us to present the novel pre-engineered spin systems for quantum information transmission. Based on the these theoretical analysis, we propose a protocol of near-perfect quantum state transfer by using a ferromagnetic Heisenberg chain with uniform coupling constant, but an external parabolic magnetic field. The numerical results shows that the initial Gaussian wave packet in this system with optimal field distribution can be reshaped near-perfectly over a longer distance., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures

We explore the physical mechanism to coherently transfer the quantum information of spin by connecting two spins to an isotropic antiferromagnetic spin ladder system as data bus. Due to a large spin gap existing in such a perfect medium, the effective Hamiltonian of the two connected spins can be archived as that of Heisenberg type, which possesses a ground state with maximal entanglement. We show that the effective coupling strength is inversely proportional to the distance of the two spins and thus the quantum information can be transferred between the two spins separated by a longer distance, i.e. the characteristic time of quantum state transferring linearly depends on the distance., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

We study the pairwise concurrences, a measure of entanglement, of the ground states for the frustrated Heisenberg ring to explore the relation between entanglement and quantum phase transition associated with the momentum jump. The groundstate concurrences between any two sites are obtained analytically and numerically. It shows that the summation of all possible pairwise concurrences is an appropriate candidate to depict the phase transition. We also investigate the role that the momentum takes in the jump of concurrence at the critical points. We find that an abrupt momentum change rusults in the maximal concurrence difference of two degenerate ground states., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures

In this paper, we propose to directly detect Mott lobes, i.e. the order parameter 〈a〉, describing the Mott insulator (MI) to superfluid (SF) quantum phase transition of the Bose–Hubbard (BH) model. By weakly coupling the system to an environment in the SF phase, the U(1) symmetry breaking of the system is simulated, and the order parameter can be read from the AC Josephson current between the system and the environment. The relation between the order parameter and the Josephson current is obtained from both the mean-field theory approach and an exact numerical simulation of a finite-size example. Our numerical simulations show that the profile of the order parameter read from the Josephson current is different from it predicted by the mean-field theory, but similar to it in a system whose U(1) symmetry is broken by a weak field proportional to a + a†. This proposal is feasible in optical lattices.

We propose the simulation for an effective scheme to realize a spin network with tunable long-range couplings in the coupled cavity array with external multi-driving lasers. Via this scheme, the linear photon-like dispersion relation is achievable, which could be employed to perform a perfect quantum state transfer. Numerical results show that when applying two lasers in each cavity, the fidelity is higher than the highest fidelity of a classical transfer even for the transfer distance l increases up to 100 sites. In the simulation, as the number of lasers increases, the fidelity will be evidently enhanced for a wide range of l.

We report a simulation of quantum cascade lasers based on the integration of a number of optoelectronic models on both microscopic and macroscopic scales. On the microscopic scale, quantum mechanical computation was performed to find the quantization states and a rate equation approach was used to compute the optical gain. On the macroscopic scale, we solved the drift-diffusion equations with modification of current density to account for long-range carrier transport, including quantum tunneling, mini-band tunneling, and hot carrier transport. Multiple lateral optical modes were computed by solving a scalar wave equation as an eigenvalue problem. Finally, multiple lateral mode laser cavity photon rate equations were solved with the drift-diffusion equations in a self-consistent manner to predict the lasing characteristics of a quantum cascade laser. The simulation compared the integrated models with experimental data from a number of AlInGaAs/InP systems with variable quantum wells and at different temperatures. Reasonable agreements with experiments have been obtained for both electrical and lasing characteristics.

The classical exchange algebra satisfied by the monodromy matrix of the nonlinear sigma model on a supercoset target with 2n grading is derived using a first-order Hamiltonian formulation and by adding to the Lax connection terms proportional to constraints. This enables us to show that the conserved charges of the theory are in involution. When n = 2, our results coincide with the results given by Magro for the pure spinor description of AdS5 × S5 string theory (when the ghost terms are omitted).

In this paper, we study the property of thermal entanglement in four-qubit Heisenberg model, where Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction is considered, and investigate the pairwise concurrences of two nearest-neighbor qubits and two next-neighbor qubits to study this entanglement property. The result shows that for the two-next-neighbor-qubit case, there exists pairwise concurrence neigher in ferromagnetic model nor in antiferromagnetic model; but for the two-nearest-neighbor-qubits case, the DM interaction and the parameter of the anisotropy exchange coupling have a significant influence on the pairwise entanglement and critical temperature Tc. Moreover, the pairwise concurrence will decrease with the increase of temperature. When the temperature execeds its critical value, the pairwise concurrence disappears. Therefore, the pairwise entanglement can be controlled and enhanced by choosing the appropriate parameters of the DM interaction and the anisotropy exchange coupling.

The mechanisms of enzyme-catalyzed phosphate transfer and hydrolysis reactions are of great interest due to their importance and abundance in biochemistry. The reaction may proceed in a stepwise fashion, with either a pentavalent phosphorane or a metaphosphate anion intermediate, or by a concerted SN2 mechanism. Despite much theoretical work focused on a few key enzymes, a consensus for the mechanism has not been reached, and examples of all three possibilities have been demonstrated. We have investigated the mechanism of human uridine-cytidine kinase 2 (UCK2, EC 2.7.1.48), which catalyzes the transfer of a phosphate group from ATP to the ribose 5'-hydroxyl of cytidine and uridine. UCK2 is normally expressed in human placenta, but is overexpressed in certain cancer cells, where it is responsible for activating a class of antitumor prodrugs. The UCK2 mechanism was investigated by generating a 2D potential energy surface as a function of the P-O bonds forming and breaking, with energies calculated using a quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics potential (B3LYP/6-31G(d):AMBER). The mechanism of phosphate transfer is shown to be concerted, and is accompanied by concerted proton transfer from the 5'-hydroxyl to a conserved active site aspartic acid that serves as a catalytic base. The calculated barrier for this reaction is 15.1 kcal/mol, in relatively good agreement with the experimental barrier of 17.5 kcal/mol. The interactions of the enzyme active site with the reactant, transition state, and product are examined for their implications on the design of anticancer prodrugs or positron emission tomography (PET) reporter probes for this enzyme.

The polarizations of optical fields, besides field intensities, provide more degrees of freedom to manipulate coherent light-matter interactions. Here we propose how to achieve a coherent switch of optomechanical entanglement in a polarized-light-driven cavity system. We show that by tuning the polarizations of the driving field, the effective optomechanical coupling can be well controlled and, as a result, quantum entanglement between the mechanical oscillator and the optical transverse electric (TE) mode can be coherently and reversibly switched to that between the same phonon mode and the optical transverse magnetic (TM) mode. This ability of switching optomechanical entanglement with such a vectorial device can be important for building a quantum network being capable of efficient quantum information interchanges between processing nodes and flying photons., To be published in Nanophotonics