Prof Dieter Jaksch

Abstract:

We show that the dipole-dipole interaction between two Rydberg atoms can lead to substantial Abelian and non-Abelian gauge fields acting on the relative motion of the two atoms. We demonstrate how the gauge fields can be evaluated by numerical techniques. In the case of adiabatic motion in a single internal state, we show that the gauge fields give rise to a magnetic field that results in a Zeeman splitting of the rotational states. In particular, the ground state of a molecular potential well is given by the first excited rotational state. We find that our system realizes a synthetic spin-orbit coupling where the relative atomic motion couples to two internal two-atom states. The associated gauge fields are non-Abelian. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd.

Abstract:

In this work we study the heat transport in an XXZ spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain with homogeneous magnetic field, incoherently driven out of equilibrium by reservoirs at the boundaries. We focus on the effect of bulk dephasing (energy-dissipative) processes in different parameter regimes of the system. The non-equilibrium steady state of the chain is obtained by simulating its evolution under the corresponding Lindblad master equation, using the time evolving block decimation method. In the absence of dephasing, the heat transport is ballistic for weak interactions, while being diffusive in the strongly interacting regime, as evidenced by the heat current scaling with the system size. When bulk dephasing takes place in the system, diffusive transport is induced in the weakly interacting regime, with the heat current monotonically decreasing with the dephasing rate. In contrast, in the strongly interacting regime, the heat current can be significantly enhanced by dephasing for systems of small size. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA Medialab srl.

Abstract:

We analyze the nonequilibrium behavior of driven nonlinear photonic resonator arrays under the selective excitation of specific photonic many-body modes. Targeting the unit-filled ground state, we find a counterintuitive "superbunching" in the emitted photon statistics in spite of relatively strong on-site repulsive interaction. We consider resonator arrays with Kerr nonlinearities described by the Bose-Hubbard model, but also show that an analogous effect is observable in near-future experiments coupling resonators to two-level systems as described by the Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard Hamiltonian. For the experimentally accessible case of a pair of coupled resonators forming a photonic molecule, we provide an analytical explanation for the nature of the effect. © 2013 American Physical Society.

Abstract:

We show that sizable Abelian and non-Abelian gauge fields arise in the relative motion of two dipole-dipole interacting Rydberg atoms. Our system exhibits two magnetic monopoles for adiabatic motion in one internal two-atom state. These monopoles occur at a characteristic distance between the atoms that is of the order of one micron. The deflection of the relative motion due to the Lorentz force gives rise to a clear signature of the effective magnetic field. In addition, we consider nonadiabatic transitions between two near-degenerate internal states and show that the associated gauge fields are non-Abelian. We present quantum mechanical calculations of this synthetic spin-orbit coupling and show that it realizes a velocity-dependent beam splitter.

Abstract:

We derive ab initio local Hubbard models for several optical lattice potentials of current interest, including the honeycomb and Kagom\'{e} lattices, verifying their accuracy on each occasion by comparing the interpolated band structures against the originals. To achieve this, we calculate the maximally-localized generalized Wannier basis by implementing the steepest-descent algorithm of Marzari and Vanderbilt [N. Marzari and D. Vanderbilt, Phys. Rev. B 56, 12847 (1997)] directly in one and two dimensions. To avoid local minima we develop an initialization procedure that is both robust and requires no prior knowledge of the optimal Wannier basis. The MATLAB code that implements our full procedure is freely available online at http://ccpforge.cse.rl.ac.uk/gf/project/mlgws/.