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The NV-NMR spectrometer is a promising candidate for detection of NMR signals at the nano scale. Field inhomogeneities, however, are a major source of noise that limits spectral resolution in state of the art NV - NMR experiments and constitutes a major bottleneck in the development of nano scale NMR. Here we propose, a route in which this limitation could be circumvented in NV-NMR spectrometer experiments, by utilising the nanometric scale and the quantumness of the detector., 5 Pages, 4 Figures

We introduce and demonstrate double-bright electromagnetically-induced-transparency (D-EIT) cooling as an extension to EIT cooling. By involving an additional ground state, two bright states can be shifted individually into resonance for cooling of motional modes of frequencies that may be separated by more than the width of a single EIT cooling resonance. This allows three-dimensional ground-state cooling of a $^{40}\mathrm{Ca}^{+}$ ion trapped in a linear Paul trap with a single cooling pulse. Measured cooling rates and steady-state mean motional quantum numbers for this D-EIT cooling are compared with those of standard EIT cooling as well as concatenated standard EIT cooling pulses for multimode cooling. Experimental results are compared to full-density matrix calculations. We observe a failure of the theoretical description within the Lamb-Dicke regime that can be overcome by a time-dependent rate theory. Limitations of the different cooling techniques and possible extensions to multi-ion crystals are discussed.

We present a detailed analysis of a robust and fast laser cooling scheme [J. Cerrillo et al.,Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 043003 (2010)] on a three-level system. A special laser configuration, applicable to trapped ions, atoms, or cantilevers, designs a double-path quantum interference that eliminates the blue sideband in addition to the carrier transition, thus excluding any heating process involving up to one-phonon interactions. As a consequence, cooling achieves vanishing phonon occupation up to first order in the Lamb-Dicke parameter expansion. Underlying this scheme is a combined action of two cooling schemes which makes the proposal very flexible under constraints of the physical parameters such as laser intensity, detuning, or optical access, making it a viable candidate for experimental implementation. Furthermore, it is considerably faster than existing ground state cooling schemes. Its suitability as a cooling scheme for several ions in a trap and three-dimensional cooling is shown., Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures

Dynamical decoupling techniques are the method of choice for increasing gate fidelities. While these methods have produced very impressive results in terms of decreasing local noise and increasing the fidelities of single qubit operations, dealing with the noise of two qubit gates has proven more challenging. The main obstacle is that the noise time scale is shorter than the two qubit gate itself so that refocusing methods do not work. We present a measurement and feedback based method to refocus two qubit gates which cannot be refocused by conventional methods. We analyze in detail this method for an error model which is relevant for trapped ions quantum information.

Amplitude noise which inflicts a random two qubit term is one of the main obstacles preventing the implementation of a high fidelity two-body gate below the fault tolerance threshold. This noise is difficult to refocus as any refocusing technique could only tackle noise with frequency below the operation rate. Since the two qubit gate speed is normally the slowest rate in the system, it constitutes the last bottleneck towards an implementation of a gate below the fault tolerant threshold. Here we propose to use composite pulses as a dynamical decoupling approach, in order to reduce two qubit gate noise for trapped ions systems. This is done by refocusing the building blocks of ultrafast entangling gates, where the amplitude noise is reduced to shot-to-shot (STS) noise. We present detailed simulations showing that the fault-tolerance threshold could be achieved with the proposed approach.

Several established techniques could theoretically be combined to produce a large nuclear polarization in randomly oriented nanodiamonds. This addresses what is currently a critical barrier to the widespread application of nanodiamonds in in-vivo medical diagnostics and MRI.

When incorporated in quantum sensing protocols, quantum error correction can be used to correct for high frequency noise, as the correction procedure does not depend on the actual shape of the noise spectrum. As such, it provides a powerful way to complement usual refocusing techniques. Relaxation imposes a fundamental limit on the sensitivity of state of the art quantum sensors which cannot be overcome by dynamical decoupling. The only way to overcome this is to utilize quantum error correcting codes. We present a superconducting magnetometry design that incorporates approximate quantum error correction, in which the signal is generated by a two qubit Hamiltonian term. This two-qubit term is provided by the dynamics of a tunable coupler between two transmon qubits. For fast enough correction, it is possible to lengthen the coherence time of the device beyond the relaxation limit.

Interferometry with massive particles may have the potential to explore the limitations of standard quantum mechanics in particular where it concerns its boundary with general relativity and the yet to be developed theory of quantum gravity. This development is hindered considerably by the lack of experimental evidence and testable predictions. Analyzing effects that appear to be common to many of such theories, such as a modification of the energy dispersion and of the canonical commutation relation within the standard framework of quantum mechanics, has been proposed as a possible way forward. Here we analyze in some detail the impact of a modified energy-momentum dispersion in a Ramsey-Bord\'e setup and provide achievable bounds of these correcting terms when operating such an interferometer with nanodiamonds. Thus, taking thermal and gravitational disturbances into account will show that without specific prerequisites, quantum gravity modifications may in general be suppressed requiring a revision of previously estimated bounds. As a possible solution we propose a stable setup that is rather insensitive to these effects. Finally, we address the problems of decoherence and pulse errors in such setups and discuss the scalings and advantages with increasing particle mass., Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures, extended discussion of the interference pattern

A proposal to use trapped ions to implement spin-one XXZ antiferromagnetic chains as an experimental tool to explore the Haldane phase is presented. We explain how to reach the Haldane phase adiabatically, demonstrate the robustness of the ground states to noise in the magnetic field and Rabi frequencies, and propose a way to detect them using their characteristics: an excitation gap and exponentially decaying correlations, a nonvanishing nonlocal string order, and a double degenerate entanglement spectrum. Scaling up to higher dimensions and more frustrated lattices, we obtain richer phase diagrams, and we can reach spin liquid phase, which can be detected by its entanglement entropy which obeys the boundary law.

We propose a scheme that utilizes the collective enhancement of a photonic mode inside an atomic ensemble together with a proper Zeeman manifold in order to achieve a heralded polarization entangled Bell state. The entanglement is between two photons that are separated in time and can be used as a post selected deterministic source for applications such as quantum repeaters where a subsequent entanglement swapping measurement is employed. We present a detailed analysis of the practical limitation of the scheme., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

Currently, laser cooling schemes are fundamentally based on the weak coupling regime. This requirement sets the trap frequency as an upper bound to the cooling rate. In this work we present a numerical study that shows the feasibility of cooling in the strong-coupling regime which then allows cooling rates that are faster than the trap frequency with experimentally feasible parameters. The scheme presented here can be applied to trapped atoms or ions as well as to mechanical oscillators. It can also cool medium sized ion chains close to the ground state.

We present a robust and fast laser cooling scheme suitable for trapped ions, atoms, or cantilevers. Based on quantum interference, generated by a special laser configuration, it is able to rapidly cool the system such that the final phonon occupation vanishes to zeroth order in the Lamb-Dicke parameter in contrast to existing cooling schemes. Furthermore, it is robust under conditions of fluctuating laser intensity and frequency, thus making it a viable candidate for experimental applications.

We investigate the entanglement between two spatially separated intervals in the vacuum state of a free one-dimensional Klein-Gordon field by means of explicit computations in the continuum limit of the linear harmonic chain. We demonstrate that the entanglement, which we quantify by the logarithmic negativity, is finite with no further need for renormalization. We find that in the critical regime, the quantum correlations are scale invariant as they depend only on the ratio of distance to length. They decay much faster than the classical correlations as in the critical limit long-range entanglement decays exponentially for separations larger than the size of the blocks, while classical correlations follow a power-law decay. With decreasing distance of the blocks, the entanglement diverges as a power law in the distance. The noncritical regime manifests richer behavior, as the entanglement depends both on the size of the blocks and on their separation. In correspondence with the von Neumann entropy also long-range entanglement distinguishes critical from noncritical systems.

We propose and study methods for detecting Unruh-like acceleration radiation effects in a Bose-Einstein condensate in a (1+1)-dimensional setup. The Bogoliubov vacuum of a Bose-Einstein condensate is used to simulate a scalar field theory, and accelerated atom dots or optical lattices serve as detectors of phonon radiation due to acceleration effects. In particular, we study the dispersive effects of the Bogoliubov spectrum on the ideal case of exact thermalization. Our results suggest that acceleration radiation effects can be observed using currently accessible experimental methods.

We discuss the consequences of the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect in setups involving several charged particles, wherein none of the charged particles encloses a closed loop around the magnetic flux. We show that in such setups, the AB phase is encoded either in the relative phase of a bipartite or multipartite entangled photons states, or alternatively, gives rise to an overall AB phase that can be measured relative to another reference system. These setups involve processes of annihilation or creation of electron-hole pairs. We discuss the relevance of such effects in ``vacuum birefringence" in QED, and comment on their connection to other known effects.

We employ an approach wherein the ground state entanglement of a relativistic free scalar field is directly probed in a controlled manner. The approach consists of having a pair of initially nonentangled detectors locally interact with the vacuum for a finite duration $T$, such that the two detectors remain causally disconnected, and then analyzing the resulting detector mixed state. We show that the correlations between arbitrarily far-apart regions of the vacuum cannot be reproduced by a local hidden-variable model, and that as a function of the distance $L$ between the regions, the entanglement decreases at a slower rate than $\ensuremath{\sim}\mathrm{exp}[\ensuremath{-}{(L∕cT)}^{3}]$.