Engineering entanglement between atoms and photons in a cavity

S. Haroche

S. Haroche

Chimdessa Gashu Feyisa, H. H. Jen

Abstract Entangled states are an important resource for quantum information processing and for the fundamental understanding of quantum physics. An intriguing open question would be whether entanglement can improve the performance of quantum heat engines in particular. One of the promising platforms to address this question is to use entangled atoms as a non-thermal bath for cavity photons, where the cavity mirror serves as a piston of the engine. Here we theoretically investigate a photonic quantum engine operating under an effective reservoir consisting of quantum-correlated pairs of atoms. We find that maximally entangled Bell states alone do not help extract useful work from the reservoir unless some extra populations in the excited states or ground states are taken into account. Furthermore, high efficiency and work output are shown for the non-maximally entangled superradiant state, while negligible for the subradiant state due to lack of emitted photons inside the cavity. Our results provide insights in the role of quantum-correlated atoms in a photonic engine and present new opportunities in designing a better quantum heat engine.

Zheng Shi-Biao

A scheme is proposed for the generation of entangled states for multiple atoms trapped in a cavity by detecting photon decay. The scheme is valid no matter when the effective atom-cavity coupling strength is larger than the cavity decay rate or not, which is of importance in view of experiment. The fidelity of entanglement is insensitive to the inefficiency of the photo-detector. The scheme does not require a photon to be initially injected into the cavity.

Sankalp Sharma, Jan Chwedeńczuk, Tomasz Wasak

Engineering atom-atom interactions is essential both for controlling novel phases of matter and for efficient preparation of many-body entangled states, which are key resources in quantum communication, computation, and metrology. In this work, we propose a scheme to tailor these interactions by coupling driven atom pairs to optical cavity photons via a molecular state in the dispersive regime, resulting in an effective photon-field-dependent potential. As an illustrative example, by analyzing the quantum Fisher information, we show that such induced interactions can generate robust many-body entanglement in two-mode ultracold bosons in an optical cavity. By tuning the photon-induced interactions through the cavity drive, we identify conditions for preparing highly entangled states on timescales that mitigate decoherence due to photon loss. Our results show that entanglement formation rate scales strongly with both photon and atom number, dramatically reducing the timescale compared to bare atomic interactions. We also identify an optimal measurement for exploiting the metrological potential of the atomic state in an interferometric protocol with significant photon losses, saturating the quantum Cramer-Rao lower bound. Furthermore, we show that despite these losses the atomic state exhibits strong Bell correlations. Our results pave the way for engineering atom-atom interactions to study novel phases of light and matter in hybrid atom-photon systems, as well as for tailoring complex quantum states for new quantum technology protocols and fundamental tests of quantum mechanics.

S. Haroche