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The generation of many-body entangled states in atomic samples should be fast, as this process always involves a subtle interplay between desired quantum effects and unwanted decoherence. Here we identify a controllable and scalable catalyst that allows metrologically useful entangled states to be generated at a high rate. This is achieved by immersing a collection of bosonic atoms, trapped in a double-well potential, in an optical cavity. In the dispersive regime, cavity photons collectively couple pairs of atoms in their ground state to a molecular state, effectively generating, photon-number dependent atom-atom interactions. These effective interactions entangle atoms at a rate that strongly scales with both the number of photons and the number of atoms. As a consequence, the characteristic time scale of entanglement formation can be much shorter than for bare atom-atom interactions, effectively eliminating the decoherence due to photon losses. Here, the control of the entanglement generation rate does not require the use of Feshbach resonances, where magnetic field fluctuations can contribute to decoherence. Our protocol may find applications in future quantum sensors or other systems where controllable and scalable many-body entanglement is desired., Comment: 5+11 pages, 2 figures

Quantum Fisher information (QFI) is a central concept in quantum sciences used to quantify the ultimate precision limit of parameter estimation, detect quantum phase transitions, witness genuine multipartite entanglement, or probe nonlocality. Despite this widespread range of applications, computing the QFI value of quantum many-body systems is, in general, a very demanding task. Here we combine ideas from functional theories and quantum information to develop a novel functional framework for the QFI of fermionic and bosonic ground states. By relying upon the constrained-search approach, we demonstrate that the QFI matricial values can universally be determined by the one-body reduced density matrix (1-RDM), avoiding thus the use of exponentially large wave functions. Furthermore, we show that QFI functionals can be determined from the universal 1-RDM functional by calculating its derivatives with respect to the coupling strengths, becoming thus the generating functional of the QFI. We showcase our approach with the Bose-Hubbard model and present exact analytical and numerical QFI functionals. Our results provide the first connection between the one-body reduced density matrix functional theory and the quantum Fisher information., Comment: 11 pages, 3 Figures

Dynamical generation of strong and scalable quantum resources, like many-body entanglement and Bell correlations, in spin-$1/2$ chains, is possible with all-to-all interactions, either for constant interaction strength realizing one-axis twisting protocol or for power-law decaying potentials. We show, however, that such quantum resources can also be dynamically generated with a finite range of interactions. We identify a necessary critical range and indicate a critical time when scalable quantum correlations appear. Finally, we show that the certification of generated states is accessible in the modern quantum simulator platforms., Comment: 6 figures

Despite the paradigmatic nature of the Fermi-polaron model, the theoretical description of its nonlinear dynamics poses challenges. Here, we apply a quantum kinetic theory of driven polarons to recent experiments with ultracold atoms, where Rabi oscillations between a Fermi-polaron state and a non-interacting level were reported. The resulting equations separate decoherence from momentum relaxation, with the corresponding rates showing a different dependence on microscopic scattering processes and quasi-particle properties. We describe both the polaron ground state and the excited repulsive-polaron state and we find a good quantitative agreement between our predictions and the available experimental data without any fitting parameter. Our approach not only takes into account collisional phenomena, but also it can be used to study the different roles played by decoherence and the collisional integral in the strongly interacting highly-imbalanced mixture of Fermi gases., Comment: 6 pages (main text), 14 pages (supplemental material), 3+5 figures

We study the relaxation dynamics of driven, two-dimensional semiconductors, where itinerant electrons dress optically pumped excitons to form two Fermi-polaron branches. Repulsive polarons excited around zero momentum quickly decay to the attractive branch at high momentum. Collisions with electrons subsequently lead to a slower relaxation of attractive polarons, which accumulate at the edge of the light-cone around zero momentum where the radiative loss dominates. The bosonic nature of exciton polarons enables stimulated scattering, which results in a lasing transition at higher pump power. The latter is characterized by a superlinear increase of light emission as well as extended spatiotemporal coherence. As the coherent peak is at the edge of the light-cone and not at the center, the many-body dressing of excitons can reduce the linewidth below the limit set by the exciton nonradiative lifetime., Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures

An ion and a polar molecule interact by an anisotropic ion-dipole potential scaling as $- \alpha \cos (\theta)/r^2$ at large distances. Due to its long-range character, it modifies the properties of angular wave functions, which are no longer given by spherical harmonics. In addition, an effective centrifugal potential in the radial equation can become attractive for low angular momenta. In this paper, we develop a general framework for an ion-dipole reactive scattering, focusing on the regime of large $\alpha$. We introduce modified spherical harmonics as solutions of the angular part of the Schr\"odinger equation and derive several useful approximations in the limit of large $\alpha$. We present a formula for the scattering amplitude expressed in terms of the modified spherical harmonics and we derive expressions for the elastic and reactive collision rates. The solutions of the radial equation are given by Bessel functions, and we analyse their behaviour in two distinct regimes corresponding, basically, to attractive and repulsive long-range centrifugal potentials. Finally, we study reactive collisions in the universal regime, where the short-range probability of loss or reaction is equal to unity., Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, 5 appendices

We generalize the textbook Kronig-Penney model to realistic conditions for a quantum-particle moving in the quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) waveguide, where motion in the transverse direction is confined by a harmonic trapping potential. Along the waveguide, the particle scatters on an infinite array of regularized delta potentials. Our starting point is the Lippmann-Schwinger equation, which for quasi-1D geometry can be solved exactly, based on the analytical formula for the quasi-1D Green's function. We study the properties of eigen-energies as a function of particle quasi-momentum, which form band structure, as in standard Kronig-Penney model. We test our model by comparing it to the numerical calculations for an atom scattering on an infinite chain of ions in quasi-1D geometry. The agreement is fairly good and can be further improved by introducing energy-dependent scattering length in the regularized delta potential. The energy spectrum exhibits the presence of multiple overlapping bands resulting from excitations in the transverse direction. At large lattice constants, our model reduces to standard Kronig-Penney result with one-dimensional coupling constant for quasi-1D scattering, exhibiting confinement-induced resonances. In the opposite limit, when lattice constant becomes comparable to harmonic oscillator length of the transverse potential, we calculate the correction to the quasi-1D coupling constant due to the quantum interference between scatterers. Finally, we calculate the effective mass for the lowest band and show that it becomes negative for large and positive scattering lengths., Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures

The interplay between measurement and quantum correlations in many-body systems can lead to novel types of collective phenomena which are not accessible in isolated systems. In this work, we merge the Zeno-paradigm of quantum measurement theory with the concept of polarons in condensed-matter physics. The resulting quantum-Zeno Fermi-polaron is a quasi-particle which emerges for lossy impurities interacting with a quantum-degenerate bath of fermions. For loss rates of the order of the impurity-fermion binding energy the quasi-particle is short lived. However, we show that in the strongly dissipative regime of large loss rates a long-lived polaron branch re-emerges. This quantum-Zeno Fermi-polaron originates from the nontrivial interplay between the Fermi-surface and the surface of the momentum region forbidden by the quantum Zeno projection. The situation we consider here is realized naturally for polaritonic impurities in charge-tuneable semiconductors and can be also implemented using dressed atomic states in ultracold gases., Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, accepted in Phys. Rev. Research

We study the beyond-mean-field corrections to the energy of a dipolar Bose gas confined to two dimensions by a box potential with dipoles oriented in plane. At a critical strength of the dipolar interaction the system becomes unstable on the mean field level. We find that the ground state of the gas is strongly influenced by the corrections, leading to formation of a self-bound droplet, in analogy to the free space case. Properties of the droplet state can be found by minimizing the extended Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional. In the limit of strong confinement we show analytically that the correction can be interpreted as an effective three-body repulsion which stabilizes the gas at finite density.

A collision of Bose-Einstein condensates is a useful source of single nonclassically correlated pairs of atoms. Here, we consider elastic scattering of atoms from elongated clouds taking into account an effective, finite duration of the collision due to the expansion of the condensates. Also, we include the quasicondensate nature of the degenerate quantum gases, due to a finite temperature of the system. We evaluate the pair correlation function measured experimentally in K. V. Kheruntsyan, et. al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 260401 (2012). We show that the finite duration of the collision is an important factor determining the properties of the correlations. Our analytic calculations are in agreement with the measurements. The analytical model we provide, useful for identifying physical processes that influence the correlations, is relevant for experiments with nonclassical pairs of atoms.

The characterization of entanglement is a central problem for the study of quantum many-body dynamics. Here, we propose the quantum Fisher information as a useful tool for the study of multipartite-entanglement dynamics in many-body systems. We illustrate this by considering the regular-to-ergodic transition in the Dicke model---a fully-connected spin model showing quantum thermalization above a critical interaction strength. We show that the QFI has a rich dynamical behavior which drastically changes across the transition. In particular, the asymptotic value of the QFI, as well as its characteristic timescales, witness the transition both through their dependence on the interaction strength and through the scaling with the system size. Since the QFI also sets the ultimate bound for the precision of parameter estimation, it provides a metrological perspective on the characterization of entanglement dynamics in many-body systems. Here we show that quantum ergodic dynamics allows for a much faster production of metrologically useful states., Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures

We study a liquid quantum droplets in a mixture of two-component Bose-Einstein condensates under a variable confinement introduced along one or two spatial dimensions. Despite the atom-atom scattering has a three-dimensional character, discreetness of the available modes in the reduced dimension(s) strongly influences the zero-point energy -- the Lee-Huang-Yang term. In a weakly interaction limit, it is the leading correction to the mean-field energy at the crossover from three to two dimensions, or from three to one dimension. We analyze the properties of the droplets at the dimensional crossovers, and provide the demanding conditions for accessing quasi-low dimensions. We predict new kinds of droplets which are formed only due to the quantum fluctuations when the mean-field interaction vanishes. Our results pave the way for exploring new states of quantum matter, and are important for experiments with liquid quantum droplets in reduced dimensions., Comment: 5 pages + supplemental material

We present a detailed analysis of the usefulness of ultracold atomic collisions for sensing the strength of an external magnetic field as well as its spatial gradient. The core idea of the sensor, which we recently proposed in K. Jachymski \emph{et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 120}, 013401 (2018), is to probe the transmission of the atoms through a set of quasi-one-dimensional waveguides that contain an impurity. Magnetic field-dependent interactions between the incoming atoms and the impurity naturally lead to narrow resonances that can act as sensitive field probes since they strongly affect the transmission. We illustrate our findings with concrete examples of experimental relevance, demonstrating that a sensitivity of the order of 1 nT for the field strength and $100\,\mathrm{nT}/\mathrm{mm}$ for the gradient can be reached using our scheme.

Hybrid systems of ultracold atoms and trapped ions or Rydberg atoms can be useful for quantum simulation purposes. By tuning the geometric arrangement of the impurities it is possible to mimic solid state and molecular systems. Here we study a single trapped atom interacting with a set of arbitrarily arranged static impurities and show that the problem admits an analytical solution. We analyze in detail the case of two impurities, finding multiple trap-induced resonances which can be used for entanglement generation. Our results serve as a building block for the studies of quantum dynamics of complex systems., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures

Feshbach resonances, which allow for tuning the interactions of ultracold atoms with an external magnetic field, have been widely used to control the properties of quantum gases. We propose a~scheme for using scattering resonances as a probe for external fields, showing that by carefully tuning the parameters it is possible to reach a $10^{-5}$G (or nT) level of precision with a single pair of atoms. We show that for our collisional setup it is possible to saturate the quantum precision bound with a simple measurement protocol.

Collisions of Bose-Einstein condensates can be used as a mean to generate correlated pairs of atoms. The scattered massive particles, in analogy to photon pairs in quantum optics, might be used in the violation of Bell's inequalities, demonstration of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations, or sub-shot noise atomic interferometry. Usually, a theoretical description of the collision relies either on stochastic numerical methods or on analytical treatments involving various approximations. Here, we investigate elastic scattering of atoms from colliding elongated Bose-Einstein condensates within Bogoliubov method, carefully controlling performed approximations at every stage of the analysis. We derive expressions for the one and two particle correlation functions. The obtained formulas, which relate the correlation functions with condensate wavefunction, are convenient for numerical calculations. We employ variational approach for condensate wavefunctions to obtain analytical expressions for the correlation functions, which properties we analyze in details. We also present a useful semiclassical model of the process, and compare its results with the quantum one. The results are relevant for recent experiments with excited helium atoms, as well as for planned experiments aimed at investigating the nonclassicality of the system., Comment: 34 pages, 8 figures

We report results of the analysis for families of one-dimensional (1D) trapped solitons, created by competing self-focusing (SF) quintic and self-defocusing (SDF) cubic nonlinear terms. Two trapping potentials are considered, the harmonic-oscillator (HO) and delta-functional ones. The models apply to optical solitons in colloidal waveguides and other photonic media, and to matter-wave solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) loaded into a quasi-1D trap. For the HO potential, the results are obtained in an approximate form, using the variational and Thomas-Fermi approximations (VA and TFA), and in a full numerical form, including the ground state and the first antisymmetric excited one. For the delta-functional attractive potential, the results are produced in a fully analytical form, and verified by means of numerical methods. Both exponentially localized solitons and weakly localized trapped modes are found for the delta-functional potential. The most essential conclusions concern the applicability of competing Vakhitov-Kolokolov (VK) and anti-VK criteria to the identification of the stability of solitons created under the action of the competing SF and SDF terms., Comment: Chaos, in press

We derive an inequality bounding the strength of temporal correlations for a pair of light beams prepared in a separable state and propagating through dispersive media with opposite signs of group velocity dispersion. The presented inequality can be violated by entangled states of light, such as photon pairs produced in spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Because the class of separable states covers the entire category of classical fields as a particular case, this result provides an unambiguously quantum feature of nonlocal dispersion cancellation that cannot be reproduced within the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure