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The quantum battery (QB) makes use of quantum effects to store and supply energy, which may outperform its classical counterpart. However, there are two challenges in this field. One is that the environment-induced decoherence causes the energy loss and aging of the QB, the other is that the decreasing of the charger-QB coupling strength with increasing their distance makes the charging of the QB become inefficient. Here, we propose a QB scheme to realize a remote charging via coupling the QB and the charger to a rectangular hollow metal waveguide. It is found that an ideal charging is realized as long as two bound states are formed in the energy spectrum of the total system consisting of the QB, the charger, and the electromagnetic environment in the waveguide. Using the constructive role of the decoherence, our QB is immune to the aging. Additionally, without resorting to the direct charger-QB interaction, our scheme works in a way of long-range and wireless-like charging. Effectively overcoming the two challenges, our result supplies an insightful guideline to the practical realization of the QB by reservoir engineering.

Irreversible entropy production (IEP) plays an important role in quantum thermodynamic processes. Here we investigate the geometrical bounds of IEP in nonequilibrium thermodynamics by exemplifying a system coupled to a squeezed thermal bath subject to dissipation and dephasing, respectively. We find that the geometrical bounds of the IEP always shift in contrary way under dissipation and dephasing, where the lower and upper bounds turning to be tighter occurs in the situation of dephasing and dissipation, respectively. However, either under dissipation or under dephasing, we may reduce both the critical time of the IEP itself and the critical time of the bounds for reaching an equilibrium by harvesting the benefits of squeezing effects, in which the values of the IEP, quantifying the degree of thermodynamic irreversibility, also becomes smaller. Therefore, due to the nonequilibrium nature of the squeezed thermal bath, the system-bath interaction energy brings prominent impact on the IEP, leading to tightness of its bounds. Our results are not contradictory with the second law of thermodynamics by involving squeezing of the bath as an available resource, which can improve the performance of quantum thermodynamic devices.

A single photon in a strongly nonlinear cavity is able to block the transmission of the second photon, thereby converting incident coherent light into anti-bunched light, which is known as photon blockade effect. On the other hand, photon anti-pairing, where only the entry of two photons is blocked and the emission of bunches of three or more photons is allowed, is based on an unconventional photon blockade mechanism due to destructive interference of two distinct excitation pathways. We propose quantum plexcitonic systems with moderate nonlinearity to generate both anti-bunched and anti-paired photons. The proposed plexitonic systems benefit from subwavelength field localizations that make quantum emitters spatially distinguishable, thus enabling a reconfigurable photon source between anti-bunched and anti-paired states via tailoring the energy bands. For a realistic nanoprism plexitonic system, two schemes of reconfiguration are suggested: (i) the chemical means by partially changing the type of the emitters; or (ii) the optical approach by rotating the polarization angle of the incident light to tune the coupling rate of the emitters. These results pave the way to realize reconfigurable nonclassical photon sources in a simple quantum plexcitonic platform with readily accessible experimental conditions.

Quantum plasmonic systems suffer from significant decoherence due to the intrinsically large dissipative and radiative dampings. Based on our quantum simulations via a quantum tensor network algorithm, we numerically demonstrate the mitigation of this restrictive drawback by hybridizing a plasmonic nanocavity with an emitter ensemble with inhomogeneously-broadened transition frequencies. By burning two narrow spectral holes in the spectral density of the emitter ensemble, the coherent time of Rabi oscillation for the hybrid system is increased tenfold. With the suppressed decoherence, we move one step further in bringing plasmonic systems into practical quantum applications.

Photon emission and absorption by an individual qubit are essential elements for the quantum manipulation of light. Here we demonstrate the controllability of spontaneous emission of a qubit in various electromagnetic environments. The parameter regimes that allow for exible control of the qubit emission routes are comprehensively discussed. By properly tuning the system couplings and decay rates, the spontaneous emission rate of the qubit can undergo Purcell enhancement and inhibition. Particularly, when the cavity is prepared in the excited state, the spontaneous emission rate of the qubit can be significantly suppressed. We also demonstrate a spectral filter effect which can be realised by controlling the steady-state emission spectra of qubits.

The concept of flat band plays an important role in strongly-correlated many-body physics. However, the demonstration of the flat band physics is highly nontrivial due to intrinsic limitations in conventional condensed matter materials. Here we propose a circuit quantum electrodynamics simulator of the 2D Lieb lattice exhibiting a flat middle band. By exploiting the simple parametric conversion method, we design a photonic Lieb lattice with \textit{in situ} tunable hopping strengths in a 2D array of coupled superconducting transmissionline resonators. Moreover, the flexibility of our proposal enables the immediate incorporation of both the artificial gauge field and the strong photon-photon interaction in a time- and site-resolved manner. To unambiguously demonstrate the synthesized flat band, we further investigate the observation of the flat band localization of microwave photons through the pumping and the steady-state measurements of only few sites on the lattice. Requiring only current level of technique and being robust against imperfections in realistic circuits, our scheme can be readily tested in experiments and may pave a new way towards the future realization of exotic photonic quantum Hall fluids including anomalous quantum Hall effect and bosonic fractional quantum Hall states without magnetic fields., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures. Published as Phys. Rev. A 93.062319

Topology is an important degree of freedom in characterizing electronic systems. Recently, it also brings new theoretical frontiers and many potential applications in photonics. However, the verification of the topological nature is highly nontrivial in photonic systems as there is no direct analog of quantized Hall conductance for bosonic photons. Here we propose a scheme of investigating topological photonics in superconducting quantum circuits by a simple parametric coupling method, the flexibility of which can lead to the effective \textit{in situ} tunable artificial gauge field for photons on a square lattice. We further study the detection of the topological phases of the photons. Our idea employs the exotic properties of the edge state modes which result in novel steady states of the lattice under the driving-dissipation competition. Through the pumping and the photon-number measurements of merely few sites, not only the spatial and the spectral characters, but also the momentums and even the integer topological quantum numbers with arbitrary values of the edge state modes can be directly probed, which reveal unambiguously the topological nature of photons on the lattice.

In this brief report, we propose a possible way, theoretically and experimentally, to generate a NOON state of the two degenerate ferromagnetic ground states of the Transverse Ising Model. In our scheme we employ the macroscopic quantum tunneling (MQT) effect between the two degenerate ferromagnetic ground states to realize the NOON state. Our calculation about the MQT process is based on a higher-order degenerate perturbation method. After doing a transformation, the MQT process could also be treated as the hopping of individual virtual fermions in the spin chain, which will leads to an analytical description of tunneling process. The experimental feasibility for generating the NOON state is discussed in the setup of linear ion trap., Comment: 4.5 pages, 3 figures

Mackinawite is a naturally-occurring layer type FeS mineral well-known to be important in biogeochemical cycles and, more recently, to the development of microbial fuel cells. Conflicting results have been published as to the magnetic properties of this mineral, with M\"ossbauer spectroscopy indicating no magnetic ordering and density functional theory predicting an antiferromagnetic ground state, similar to the Fe-based high-temperature superconductors with which it is isostructural and for which it is known that magnetism is suppressed by strong itinerant spin fluctuations. We investigated this latter possibility for mackinawite using photoemission spectroscopy (PES), near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy (XAS), and density functional theory (DFT) computations. Our Fe 3s core-level PES spectrum of mackinawite showed a clear exchange-energy splitting (2.9 eV) consistent with a 1 {\mu}B magnetic moment on the Fe ions, while the Fe L-edge XAS spectrum indicated rather delocalized Fe 3d electrons in mackinawite similar to those in Fe metal. DFT computations demonstrated that the ground state of mackinawite is single-stripe antiferromagnetic, with an Fe magnetic moment (2.7 {\mu}B) that is significantly larger than the experimental estimate and has a strong dependence on the S height and lattice parameters. All of these trends signal the existence of strong itinerant spin fluctuations.If strong spin fluctuations prove to be the mediators of electron pairing in these Fe-based superconductors, we conjecture that mackinawite may be one of the simplest Fe-based superconductors., Comment: Evidence of FeS spin fluctuations

The diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is an excellent candidate for quantum information processing, whereas entangling separate NV centers is still of great experimental challenge. We propose an one-step conditional phase flip with three NV centers coupled to a whispering-gallery mode cavity by virtue of the Raman transition and smart qubit encoding. As decoherence is much suppressed, our scheme could work for more qubits. The experimental feasibility is justified., Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, Accepted by Appl. Phys. Lett

A potential quantum information processor is proposed using a fullerene peapod, i.e., an array of the endohedral fullerenes 15N@C60 or 31P@C60 contained in a single walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT). The qubits are encoded in the nuclear spins of the doped atoms, while the electronic spins are used for initialization and readout, as well as for two-qubit operations., Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures

We theoretically study the realization of a multi-qubit refined Deutsch-Jozsa (DJ) algorithm using resonant interaction of many Rydberg atoms with a single-mode microwave cavity, in which the multi-qubit controlled phase gates could be accomplished efficiently. We show how to achieve a multi-qubit refined DJ algorithm in high fidelity, even in the case of a weak cavity decay and some imperfection. We argue that the required operations in our scheme are almost within the present experimental possibilities.

We propose a potentially practical scheme for realization of an n-qubit (n>2) conditional phase flip (CPF) gate and implementation of Grover search algorithm in the ion-trap system. We demonstrate both analytically and numerically that, our scheme could be achieved efficiently to find a marked state with high fidelity and high success probability. We also show the merits of the proposal that the increase of the ion number can improve the fidelity and the success probability of the CPF gate. The required operations for Grover search are very close to the capabilities of current ion-trap techniques., Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, accepted by J. Opt. Soc. Am. B

We propose a many-qubit network with cavity QED by encoding qubits in decoherence-free subspace, based on which we can implement many-logic-qubit conditional gates by means of cavity assisted interaction with single-photon pulses. Our scheme could not only resist collective dephasing errors, but also much reduce the implementational steps compared to conventional methods doing the same job, and we can also complete communications between two arbitrary nodes. We show the details by implementing a three-logic-qubit Toffoli gate, and explore the experimental feasibility and challenge based on currently achievable cavity QED technologies., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. to be published in Phys. Rev. A