Efficient light transfer in coupled nonlinear triple waveguides using shortcuts to adiabaticity.

We use the method of shortcuts to adiabaticity to design the variable couplings in a three-waveguide directional coupler which may contain nonlinear elements, in order to accomplish efficient light transfer between the outer waveguides for shorter device lengths, despite the presence of nonlinearity. The shortcut couplings are obtained for the ideal case where all the waveguides are linear, for which a perfect transfer is guaranteed in theory, but are tested for various combinations of linear and nonlinear waveguides in the device. We show with numerical simulations that, in most configurations, high levels of transfer efficiency can be maintained even for large values of the input power, and for shorter lengths than those of conventional adiabatic devices.

Efficient Biexciton State Preparation in a Semiconductor Quantum Dot Coupled to a Metal Nanoparticle with Linearly Chirped Gaussian Pulses.

We consider a hybrid nanostructure composed of a semiconductor quantum dot placed near a spherical metallic nanoparticle, and study the effect of the nanoparticle on the population transferral from the ground to the biexciton state of the quantum dot, when using linearly chirped Gaussian pulses. For various values of the system parameters (biexciton energy shift, pulse area and chirp, interparticle distance), we calculate the final population of the biexciton state by performing numerical simulations of the non-linear density matrix equations which describe the coupled system, as well as its interaction with the applied electromagnetic field. We find that for relatively large values of the biexciton energy shift and not very small interparticle distances, the presence of the nanoparticle improves the biexciton state preparation, since it effectively increases the area of the applied pulse.

Efficient Biexciton Preparation in a Quantum Dot-Metal Nanoparticle System Using On-Off Pulses.

We consider a hybrid nanostructure composed by semiconductor quantum dot coupled to a metallic nanoparticle and investigate the efficient creation of biexciton state in the quantum dot, when starting from the ground state and using linearly polarized laser pulses with on-off modulation. With numerical simulations of the coupled system density matrix equations, we show that a simple on-off-on pulse-sequence, previously derived for the case of an isolated quantum dot, can efficiently prepare the biexciton state even in the presence of the nanoparticle, for various interparticle distances and biexciton energy shifts. The pulse durations in the sequence are obtained from the solution of a transcendental equation.

Ultimate conversion efficiency bound for the forward double-Λ atom-light coupling scheme.

We show that for the two widely used configurations of the double- atom-light coupling scheme, one where the control fields are applied in the same -subsystem and another where they are applied in different -subsystems, the forward propagation of the probe and signal fields is described by the same set of equations. We then use optimal control theory to find the spatially dependent optimal control fields that maximize the conversion efficiency from the probe to the signal field, for a given optical density. This work can find application in the implementation of efficient frequency and orbital angular momentum conversion devices for quantum information processing, as well as to be useful for many other applications using the double- atom-light coupling scheme.

Efficient entanglement generation between exciton-polaritons using shortcuts to adiabaticity.

We use shortcuts to adiabaticity, a method introduced to speed up adiabatic quantum dynamics, for the efficient generation of entanglement between exciton-polaritons in coupled semiconductor microcavities. A substantial improvement is achieved, compared to a recently proposed method that essentially enhances the nonlinearity of the system. Our method takes advantage of a time-dependent nonlinearity, which can become larger than the Josephson coupling between the cavities, while the conventional method is restricted to a constant nonlinearity lower than the coupling.

Exponential bound in the quest for absolute zero.

In most studies for the quantification of the third law of thermodynamics, the minimum temperature which can be achieved with a long but finite-time process scales as a negative power of the process duration. In this article, we use our recent complete solution for the optimal control problem of the quantum parametric oscillator to show that the minimum temperature which can be obtained in this system scales exponentially with the available time. The present work is expected to motivate further research in the active quest for absolute zero.

Optimal efficiency of a noisy quantum heat engine.

In this article we use optimal control to maximize the efficiency of a quantum heat engine executing the Otto cycle in the presence of external noise. We optimize the engine performance for both amplitude and phase noise. In the case of phase damping we additionally show that the ideal performance of a noiseless engine can be retrieved in the adiabatic (long time) limit.

Antiphase synchronization of phase-reduced oscillators using open-loop control.

In this report we present an elegant method to build and maintain an antiphase configuration of two nonlinear oscillators with different natural frequencies and dynamics described by the sinusoidal phase-reduced model. The antiphase synchronization is achieved using a common input that couples the oscillators and consists of a sequence of square pulses of appropriate amplitude and duration. This example provides a proof of principle that open-loop control can be used to create desired synchronization patterns for nonlinear oscillators, when feedback is expensive or impossible to obtain.

A pseudospectral method for optimal control of open quantum systems.

In this paper, we present a unified computational method based on pseudospectral approximations for the design of optimal pulse sequences in open quantum systems. The proposed method transforms the problem of optimal pulse design, which is formulated as a continuous-time optimal control problem, to a finite-dimensional constrained nonlinear programming problem. This resulting optimization problem can then be solved using existing numerical optimization suites.