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The radical pair mechanism is an important model that may provide a basis for biological magnetoreception. To account for the high orientation precision of the real avian compass, P. J. Hore et al. proposed an intriguing phenomenon called quantum needle [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 113, 4634 (2016)], where a spike-like feature emerges in the fractional yield signal. However, it is believed that quantum needle requires the radical pair lifetime to be longer than a few microseconds and thus poses stern challenges in realistic biological systems. Here, we exploit the optimization techniques and find a novel class of model system, which sustains much more prominent features of quantum needle and significantly relaxes the requirement for radical pair lifetime. Even more surprisingly, we find that the characteristics of quantum needle retain a narrow functional window around the geomagnetic field, which is absent in the previous model systems. Therefore, our work provides essential evidence for identifying the possible physical mechanism for quantum needle in chemical magnetoreception.

Decoherence-protected spins associated with nitrogen-vacancy color centers in diamond possess remarkable long coherence time, which make them one of the most promising and robust quantum registers. The current demand is to explore practical rapid control strategies for preparing and manipulating the such register. Our work provides all-microwave control strategies optimized using multiple optimization methods to significantly reduce the processing time by $80\%$ with a set of smooth near-zero-endpoints control fields that are shown to be experimentally realizable. Furthermore, we optimize and analyze the robustness of these strategies under frequency and amplitude imperfections of the control fields, during which process we use only $16$ samples to give a fair estimation of the robustness map with $2500$ pixels. Overall, we provide a ready-to-implement recipe to facilitate high-performance information processing via decoherence-protected quantum register for future quantum technology applications., Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures

Humans are experts in making decisions for challenging driving tasks with uncertainties. Many efforts have been made to model the decision-making process of human drivers at the behavior level. However, limited studies explain how human drivers actively make reliable sequential decisions to complete interactive driving tasks in an uncertain environment. This paper argues that human drivers intently search for actions to reduce the uncertainty of their perception of the environment, i.e., perceptual uncertainty, to a low level that allows them to make a trustworthy decision easily. This paper provides a proof of concept framework to empirically reveal that human drivers' perceptual uncertainty decreases when executing interactive tasks with uncertainties. We first introduce an explainable-artificial intelligence approach (i.e., SHapley Additive exPlanation, SHAP) to determine the salient features on which human drivers make decisions. Then, we use entropy-based measures to quantify the drivers' perceptual changes in these ranked salient features across the decision-making process, reflecting the changes in uncertainties. The validation and verification of our proposed method are conducted in the highway on-ramp merging scenario with congested traffic using the INTERACTION dataset. Experimental results support that human drivers intentionally seek information to reduce their perceptual uncertainties in the number and rank of salient features of their perception of environments to make a trustworthy decision., Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures

The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center spin represents an appealing candidate for quantum information processing. Besides the widely used microwave control, its coherent manipulation may also be achieved using laser as mediated by the excited energy levels. Nevertheless, the multiple levels of the excited state of NV center spin make the coherent transition process become complex and may affect the fidelity of coherent manipulation. Here, we adopt the strategy of optimal quantum control to accelerate coherent state transfer in the ground state manifold of NV center spin using laser. The results demonstrate improved performance in both the speed and the fidelity of coherent state transfer which will be useful for optical control of NV center spin in diamond.

The features of topological physics can manifest in a variety of physical systems in distinct ways. Periodically driven systems, with the advantage of high flexibility and controllability, provide a versatile platform to simulate many topological phenomena and may lead to novel phenomena that can not be observed in the absence of driving. Here we investigate the influence of realistic experimental noise on the realization of a two-level system under a two-frequency drive that induces topologically nontrivial band structure in the two-dimensional Floquet space. We propose a dynamical decoupling scheme that sustains the topological phase transition overcoming the influence of dephasing. Therefore, the proposal would facilitate the observation of topological frequency conversion in the solid state spin system, e.g. NV center in diamond., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures

Symbolic melodies generation is one of the essential tasks for automatic music generation. Recently, models based on neural networks have had a significant influence on generating symbolic melodies. However, the musical context structure is complicated to capture through deep neural networks. Although long short-term memory (LSTM) is attempted to solve this problem through learning order dependence in the musical sequence, it is not capable of capturing musical context with only one note as input for each time step of LSTM. In this paper, we propose a novel Enhanced Memory Network (EMN) with several recurrent units, named Enhanced Memory Unit (EMU), to explicitly modify the internal architecture of LSTM for containing music beat information and reinforces the memory of the latest musical beat through aggregating beat inside the memory gate. In addition, to increase the diversity of generated musical notes, cosine distance among adjacent time steps of hidden states is considered as part of loss functions to avoid a high similarity score that harms the diversity of generated notes. Objective and subjective evaluation results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code and music demo are available at https://github.com/qrqrqrqr/EMU

Quantum optimal control represents a powerful technique to enhance the performance of quantum experiments by engineering the controllable parameters of the Hamiltonian. However, the computational overhead for the necessary optimization of these control parameters drastically increases as their number grows. We devise a novel variant of a gradient-free optimal-control method by introducing the idea of phase-modulated driving fields, which allows us to find optimal control fields efficiently. We numerically evaluate its performance and demonstrate the advantages over standard Fourier-basis methods in controlling an ensemble of two-level systems showing an inhomogeneous broadening. The control fields optimized with the phase-modulated method provide an increased robustness against such ensemble inhomogeneities as well as control-field fluctuations and environmental noise, with one order of magnitude less of average search time. Robustness enhancement of single quantum gates is also achieved by the phase-modulated method. Under environmental noise, an XY-8 sequence constituted by optimized gates prolongs the coherence time by $50\%$ compared with standard rectangular pulses in our numerical simulations, showing the application potential of our phase-modulated method in improving the precision of signal detection in the field of quantum sensing., Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures

The quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound sets a fundamental limit on the accuracy of unbiased parameter estimation in quantum systems, relating the uncertainty in determining a parameter to the inverse of the quantum Fisher information. We experimentally demonstrate near saturation of the quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound in the phase estimation of a solid-state spin system, provided by a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond. This is achieved by comparing the experimental uncertainty in phase estimation with an independent measurement of the related quantum Fisher information. The latter is independently extracted from coherent dynamical responses of the system under weak parametric modulations, without performing any quantum-state tomography. While optimal parameter estimation has already been observed for quantum devices involving a limited number of degrees of freedom, our method offers a versatile and powerful experimental tool to explore the Cram\'er-Rao bound and the quantum Fisher information in systems of higher complexity, as relevant for quantum technologies.

Quantum sensing exploits fundamental features of quantum system to achieve highly efficient measurement of physical quantities. Here, we propose a strategy to realize a single-qubit pseudo-Hermitian sensor from a dilated two-qubit Hermitian system. The pseudo-Hermitian sensor exhibits divergent susceptibility in dynamical evolution that does not necessarily involve exceptional point. We demonstrate its potential advantages to overcome noises that cannot be averaged out by repetitive measurements. The proposal is feasible with the state-of-art experimental capability in a variety of qubit systems, and represents a step towards the application of non-Hermitian physics in quantum sensing., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure, comments are welcome

One of the key challenges for the implementation of scalable quantum information processing is the design of scalable architectures that support coherent interaction and entanglement generation between distant quantum systems. We propose a nanotube double quantum dot spin transducer that allows to achieve steady-state entanglement between nitrogen-vacancy center spins in diamond with spatial separations over micrometers. The distant spin entanglement further enables us to design a scalable architecture for solid-state quantum information processing based on a hybrid platform consisting of nitrogen-vacancy centers and carbon-nanotube double quantum dots., Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures