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New Journal of Physics

Molecular binding in interacting quantum walks

André Ahlbrecht, Andrea Alberti, Dieter Meschede, Volkher B. Scholz, Albert H. Werner, Reinhard F. Werner

Published Jul 26, 2012• 97 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We show that the presence of an interaction in the quantum walk of two atoms leads to the formation of a stable compound, a molecular state. The wave function of the molecule decays exponentially in the relative position of the two atoms; hence it constitutes a true bound state. Furthermore, for a certain class of interactions, we develop an effective theory and find that the dynamics of the molecule is described by a quantum walk in its own right. We propose a setup for the experimental realization as well as sketch the possibility to observe quasi-particle effects in quantum many-body systems.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/14/7/073050

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We show that the presence of an interaction in the quantum walk of two atoms leads to the formation of a stable compound, a molecular state. The wave function of the molecule decays exponentially in the relative position of the two atoms; hence it constitutes a true bound state. Furthermore, for a certain class of interactions, we develop an effective theory and find that the dynamics of the molecule is described by a quantum walk in its own right. We propose a setup for the experimental realization as well as sketch the possibility to observe quasi-particle effects in quantum many-body systems.
We investigate a system of two atoms in an optical lattice, performing a quantum walk by state-dependent shift operations and a coin operation acting on the internal states. The atoms interact, e.g., by cold collisions, whenever they are in the same potential well of the lattice. Under such conditions they typically develop a bound state, so that the two atoms effectively perform a quantum walk together, rarely moving further from each other than a few lattice sites. The theoretical analysis is based on a theory of quantum walks with a point defect, applied to the difference variable. We also discuss the feasibility of an experimental realization in existing quantum walk experiments.
In this thesis we study the propagation behavior of quantum particles which perform discrete-time quantum walks on spatial lattices.By definition, quantum walks are discrete-time evolutions such that a single time step couples only neighboring lattice sites.Additionally, we assume in this thesis that the dynamical law commutes with all translations of the spatial lattice, that is we consider translationally invariant quantum walks.The results presented in the following are separated into two parts: The first part is devoted to the study of single-particle quantum walks, and in the second part we investigate quantum walks of several particles.Single-particle quantum walks: Our aim is to study the asymptotic behavior of particles undergoing general translationally invariant quantum walks.Employing perturbation theory, we establish a direct method for computing the asymptotic distribution of the particle's position rescaled by an appropriate time-dependent factor.If the time evolution is implemented by a unitary operator commuting with all lattice translations and with empty pure point spectrum, we find linear scaling of the asymptotic position distribution.In this case, the asymptotic distribution of position divided by time is determined by the analog of the group velocity.If, on the other hand, the quantum walk is subject to decoherence, we expect that it behaves like a classical random walk.We provide explicit criteria under which this intuitive statement is true, that is, the asymptotic scaling of the particle's position distribution is that of a diffusion process.We find that the asymptotic distribution of position divided by the square root of time is a mixture of Gaussians in this case.However, we also provide examples of decoherent quantum walks which violate these criteria, and exhibit linear scaling of the asymptotic position distribution. Many-particle quantum walks:We investigate unitary quantum walks of two particles with collisional interactions.That is, the particles perform independent single-particle quantum walks if they are at distinct lattice sites, and an interaction takes place if both particles occupy the same lattice site.We prove that such quantum walks generically exhibit a molecular binding effect between the particles.More precisely, for a measurement of the particles' positions we have a bound on the probability to obtain a certain result which decays exponentially with the particles' distance.As a preparatory step for this analysis, we consider single-particle quantum walks with point defects, and provide a method to compute their eigenvalues in the spectral gap of the quantum walk without defect.We further generalize our model to arbitrary numbers of particles and study the behavior of local excitations in many-particle quantum walks.
We study hybrid atom-molecule quantum walks in one-dimensional optical lattices with two interacting bosonic atoms which may be converted into a molecule. The hybrid atom-molecule energy bands include a continuum band and two isolated bands, which respectively correspond to scattering states and dressed bound states (DBSs). Because of the atom-molecule coupling, the DBSs may appear even in the absence of atom-atom interaction. From an initial state of two atoms occupying the same site, in addition to independent quantum walks which correspond to scattering states, correlated quantum walks appear as a signature of DBSs. Even if the atom-atom interaction and the atom-molecule coupling are much stronger than the tunneling strengths, independent quantum walks may still appear under certain resonant conditions. The correlated quantum walks show two light cones with different propagation velocities, which can be analytically explained by the effective tunneling strengths of the two different DBSs. Furthermore, the effective nearest-neighbor tunneling of DBSs can be suppressed to zero, which can be explained by the destructive interference between the atomic pair and the molecule.
We study the role played by noise on the bounded state of a two-particle QW with interaction, as introduced in [1]. The bounded (molecular) state can be effectively described as a one-particle QW in 1D, with a coin operator which depends on the extra phase that is acquired by the interaction at each time step. The noise is introduced by a random change in the value of the phase during the evolution, from a constant probability distribution within a given interval. The consequences of introducing such kind of noise depend on both the center value and the width of that interval: a wider interval manifests as a higher level of noise. The center value is also important for the fate of the molecular state (as noise increases). Depending on this value, the molecule can be destroyed. More interestingly, one can also find some range of parameters for which the bound state survives under the form of a localized state, a situation that can be related to the violation of the stability criterion of the molecule. The existence of this localized state for such kind of time-dependent noise is, to the best of our knowledge, totally new, since localization (i.e., Anderson localization) is linked in the literature to a spatial random noise.
We present a new approach to investigating Rydberg molecules by demonstrating the formation and characterization of individual Rb^{*}Cs Rydberg molecules using optical tweezers. By employing single-atom detection of Rb and Cs, we observe molecule formation via correlated loss of both species and study the formation dynamics with single-particle resolution. We control the interatomic distances by manipulating the relative wave function of atom pairs using the tweezer intensity, optimizing the coupling to molecular states and exploring the effect of the tweezer on these states. Additionally, we demonstrate molecule association with atoms trapped in separate tweezers, paving the way for state-selective assembly of polyatomic molecules. The observed binding energies, molecular alignment, and bond lengths are in good agreement with theory. Our approach is broadly applicable to Rydberg tweezer platforms, expanding the range of available molecular systems and enabling the integration of Rydberg molecules into existing quantum science platforms.