We study the creation of nonlocal states with ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice. We show that these states violate Bell inequality by measuring one- and two-body correlations. Our scheme only requires beam-splitting operations and global phase shifts, and can be realized within the current technology, employing single-site addressing. This proposal paves the way to study multipartite nonlocality and entanglement in ultracold-atomic systems.
We study the creation of nonlocal states with ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice. We show that these states violate Bell inequality by measuring one- and two-body correlations. Our scheme only requires beam-splitting operations and global phase shifts, and can be realized within the current technology, employing single-site addressing. This proposal paves the way to study multipartite nonlocality and entanglement in ultracold-atomic systems.
Bell nonlocality stems from quantum correlations effectively identified using inequalities. Spin chains, simulated with ultracold atoms in optical lattices, Rydberg atoms in tweezer arrays, trapped ions, or molecules allow single-spin control and measurement. Therefore, they are suitable for studying fundamental aspects of these correlations and nonlocality. Occupation defects, such as vacancies or multiple atoms occupying a single site due to imperfect system preparation, limit the detection of Bell correlations. We study their effects with the help of a simplified toy model parametrized by the probability p of having a single occupation for a given site. Within this model, and for entangled systems obtained by one-axis twisting evolution from an initial factorized state, we derive two Bell inequalities, one based on many-site correlations and the other on two-site correlations, and identify the smallest probability p that allows the Bell inequalities violation to be detected. We then consider two physical realizations using entangled ultracold atoms in optical lattices where the parameter p is related to a nonunitary filling factor and nonzero temperature. We test the predictions of the toy model against exact numerical results.
Intensive studies of entanglement properties have proven essential for our understanding of quantum many-body systems. In contrast, much less is known about the role of quantum nonlocality in these systems because the available multipartite Bell inequalities involve correlations among many particles, which are difficult to access experimentally. We constructed multipartite Bell inequalities that involve only two-body correlations and show how they reveal the nonlocality in many-body systems relevant for nuclear and atomic physics. Our inequalities are violated by any number of parties and can be tested by measuring total spin components, opening the way to the experimental detection of many-body nonlocality, for instance with atomic ensembles.
We study the atom-light interaction in the fully quantum regime, with the focus on off-resonant light scattering into a cavity from ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice. Because of the global coupling between the atoms and the light modes, observing the photons leaking from the cavity allows the quantum nondemolition (QND) measurement of quantum correlations of the atomic ensemble, distinguishing between different quantum states. Moreover, the detection of the photons perturbs the quantum state of the atoms via the so-called measurement backaction. This effect constitutes an unusual additional dynamical source in a many-body strongly correlated system and it is able to efficiently compete with its intrinsic short-range dynamics. This competition becomes possible due to the ability to change the spatial profile of a global measurement at a microscopic scale comparable to the lattice period, without the need of single site addressing. We demonstrate nontrivial dynamical effects such as large-scale multimode oscillations, breakup and protection of strongly interacting fermion pairs. We show that measurement backaction can be exploited for realizing quantum states with spatial modulations of the density and magnetization, thus overcoming usual requirement for a strong interatomic interactions. We propose detection schemes for implementing antiferromagnetic states and density waves and we demonstrate that such long-range correlations cannot be realized with local addressing. Finally, we describe how to stabilize these emerging phases with the aid of quantum feedback. Such a quantum optical approach introduces into many-body physics novel processes, objects, and methods of quantum engineering, including the design of many-body entangled environments for open systems and it is easily extendable to other systems promising for quantum technologies.
Nonlocal entanglement between pair-correlated particles is a highly counter-intuitive aspect of quantum mechanics, where measurement on one particle can instantly affect the other, regardless of distance. While the rigorous Bell’s inequality framework has enabled the demonstration of such entanglement in photons and atomic internal states, no experiment has yet involved motional states of massive particles. Here we report the experimental observation of Bell correlations in motional states of momentum-entangled ultracold helium atoms. Momentum-entangled pairs are first generated via s-wave collisions. Using a Rarity-Tapster interferometer and a Bell-test framework, we observe atom-atom correlations required for violation of a Bell inequality. This result shows the potential of ultracold atoms for fundamental tests of quantum mechanics and opens new avenues to studying gravitational effects in quantum states. Momentum-entangled atom pairs are used to demonstrate quantum non-locality, where changing one atom in an entangled pair instantly alters the state of the other atom. This result paves the way to study interactions between quantum states and gravity.
Current understanding of correlations and quantum phase transitions in many-body systems has significantly improved thanks to the recent intensive studies of their entanglement properties. In contrast, much less is known about the role of quantum non-locality in these systems. On the one hand, standard, "theorist- and experimentalist-friendly" many-body observables involve correlations among only few (one, two, rarely three...) particles. On the other hand, most of the available multipartite Bell inequalities involve correlations among many particles. Such correlations are notoriously hard to access theoretically, and even harder experimentally. Typically, there is no Bell inequality for many-body systems built only from low-order correlation functions. Recently, however, it has been shown in [J. Tura et al., Science 344, 1256 (2014)] that multipartite Bell inequalities constructed only from two-body correlation functions are strong enough to reveal non-locality in some many-body states, in particular those relevant for nuclear and atomic physics. The purpose of this lecture is to provide an overview of the problem of quantum correlations in many-body systems - from entanglement to nonlocality - and the methods for their characterization.
We investigate how to create entangled states of ultracold atoms trapped in optical lattices by dynamically manipulating the shape of the lattice potential. We consider an additional potential (the superlattice) that allows both the splitting of each site into a double well potential, and control of the height of the potential barrier between sites. We use superlattice manipulations to perform entangling operations between neighbouring qubits encoded on the Zeeman levels of the atoms without having to perform transfers between the different vibrational states of the atoms. We show how to use superlattices to engineer many-body entangled states resilient to collective dephasing noise. Also, we present a method to realize a two-dimensional (2D) resource for measurement-based quantum computing via Bell-pair measurements. We analyse measurement networks that allow the execution of quantum algorithms while maintaining the resilience properties of the system throughout the computation.