We propose a novel nondestructive method for the detection of single Rydberg excitations in a mesoscopic ensemble. The protocol achieves high fidelities on a microsecond timescale and is robust against changes in the probe laser frequency. The technique relies on optical pumping in Autler Townes configuration, whose efficiency is controlled by the presence or absence of a Rydberg excitation. Taking rubidium atoms as an example, we give realistic estimates for the achievable fidelities and parameters. However, our protocol can be transferred to any other atomic species that features multiple stable states. Our protocol is applicable in quantum simulation and quantum information processing with mesoscopic ensembles requiring fast and high-fidelity Rydberg state detection.
We extend the single mode approximation (SMA) into quantum Monte Carlo simulations to provides an efficient and fast method to obtain the dynamical dispersion of quantum many-body systems. Based on stochastic series expansion (SSE) and its projector algorithms, the
SMA+SSE method can simply extract the dispersion of the dynamical dispersion in the long-wavelength limit and the upper bound of the dispersion elsewhere, without external calculations and high technique barriers. Meanwhile, numerical analytic continuation methods require the fine data of imaginary time correlations and complex programming. Therefore, our method can approach the excitation dispersion of large systems, e.g., we take the two-dimensional Heisenberg model on a $512\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}512$ square lattice. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method with high precision via additional examples. We also demonstrate that SMA combined with SSE goes beyond spin-wave theory with numerical results. We further illustrate that SMA is able to extract useful information in strongly correlated systems with competing states.
Excitation of trapped-ion hyperfine qubits with fast optical Raman pulses enables faster-than-trap-period entangling gates with qubits of long coherence time for practical quantum computation. Achieving high-fidelity fast two-qubit gates requires high-quality spin-dependent kicks (SDKs), which form their fundamental building blocks. Here, we characterize the control parameters (including Raman frequency difference, pulse arrival times, Lamb--Dicke parameter, temperature, pulse width, and SDK time) that maximize the performance of single-ion SDKs for protocols compatible with performed experiments involving a small number of fast pulses. We demonstrate through analytical methods and numerical simulations that, within the model commonly used for infidelity optimization, finite pulse duration is the dominant source of error, exceeding the contribution of secular motion by orders of magnitude for nanosecond-scale SDKs. Low infidelities -- below
10−3 for schemes with
≳10 fixed-amplitude, equispaced, picosecond pulses -- are achievable in SDK times on the order of nanoseconds. These results provide quantitative design rules for achieving competitive SDK fidelities with current pulsed-laser technology, laying the foundation for sub-microsecond trapped-ion quantum entangling operations.