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  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Guoling Yin, Chi-Kin Lai, Nana Chang, Yi Liang, Dekai Mao, Xiaoji Zhou
    Frontiers of Physics, 2024, 19(6): 62201. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-024-1420-9

    Advancements in the experimental toolbox of cold atoms have enabled the meticulous control of atomic Bloch oscillation (BO) within optical lattices, thereby enhancing the capabilities of gravity interferometers. This work delves into the impact of thermal effects on Bloch oscillation in 1D accelerated optical lattices aligned with gravity by varying the system’s initial temperature. Through the application of Raman cooling, we effectively reduce the longitudinal thermal effect, stabilizing the longitudinal coherence length over the timescale of its lifetime. The atomic losses over multiple Bloch periods are measured, which are primarily attributed to transverse excitation. Furthermore, we identify two distinct inverse scaling behaviors in the oscillation lifetime scaled by the corresponding density with respect to temperatures, implying diverse equilibrium processes within or outside the Bose−Einstein condensate (BEC) regime. The competition between the system’s coherence and atomic density leads to a relatively smooth variation in the actual lifetime versus temperature. Our findings provide valuable insights into the interaction between thermal effects and BO, offering avenues for the refinement of quantum measurement technologies.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Yadong Wu, Juan Yao, Pengfei Zhang
    Frontiers of Physics, 2023, 18(6): 61301. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-023-1311-5

    The preparation of quantum states is crucial for enabling quantum computations and simulations. In this work, we present a general framework for preparing ground states of many-body systems by combining the measurement-feedback control process (MFCP) with machine learning techniques. Specifically, we employ Bayesian optimization (BO) to enhance the efficiency of determining the measurement and feedback operators within the MFCP. As an illustration, we study the ground state preparation of the one-dimensional Bose−Hubbard model. Through BO, we are able to identify optimal parameters that can effectively drive the system towards low-energy states with a high probability across various quantum trajectories. Our results open up new directions for further exploration and development of advanced control strategies for quantum computations and simulations.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Kexin Liang, Zhengwen Cao, Xinlei Chen, Lei Wang, Geng Chai, Jinye Peng
    Frontiers of Physics, 2023, 18(5): 51301. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-023-1284-4

    Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is a method of communication that transmits secret information directly through a quantum channel. This paper proposes a two-step QSDC scheme based on intermediate-basis, in which the intermediate-basis Einstein−Podolsky−Rosen (EPR) pairs can assist to detect channel security and help encode information. Specifically, the intermediate-basis EPR pairs reduce the probability of Eve choosing the correct measurement basis in the first step, enhancing the security of the system. Moreover, they encode information together with information EPR pairs to improve the transmission efficiency in the second step. We consider the security of the protocol under coherent attack when Eve takes different dimensions of the auxiliary system. The simulation results show that intermediate-basis EPR pairs can lower the upper limit of the amount of information that Eve can steal in both attack scenarios. Therefore, the proposed protocol can ensure that the legitimate parties get more confidential information and improve the transmission efficiency.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Ming-Cheng Liang, Zhi-Xing Lin, Yang-Yang Chen, Xi-Wen Guan, Xibo Zhang
    Frontiers of Physics, 2022, 17(6): 61501. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-022-1186-x

    Weakly interacting quantum systems in low dimensions have been investigated for a long time, but there still remain a number of open questions and a lack of explicit expressions of physical properties of such systems. In this work, we find power-law scalings of thermodynamic observables in low-dimensional interacting Bose gases at quantum criticality. We present a physical picture for these systems with the repulsive interaction strength approaching zero; namely, the competition between the kinetic and interaction energy scales gives rise to power-law scalings with respect to the interaction strength in characteristic thermodynamic observables. This prediction is supported by exact Bethe ansatz solutions in one dimension, demonstrating a simple 1/3-power-law scaling of the critical entropy per particle. Our method also yields results in agreement with a non-perturbative renormalization-group computation in two dimensions. These results provide a new perspective for understanding many-body phenomena induced by weak interactions in quantum gases.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Xin-Jie Zhou, Wen-Qiang Liu, Hai-Rui Wei, Yan-Bei Zheng, Fang-Fang Du
    Frontiers of Physics, 2022, 17(5): 41502. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-022-1168-z

    Hyperentangled Bell states analysis (HBSA) is an essential building block for certain hyper-parallel quantum information processing. We propose a complete and deterministic HBSA scheme encoded in spatial and polarization degrees of freedom (DOFs) of two-photon system assisted by a fixed frequency-based entanglement and a time interval DOF. The parity information the spatial-based and polarization-based hyper-entanglement can be distinguished by the distinct time intervals of the photon pairs, and the phase information can be distinguished by the detection signature. Compared with previous schemes, the number of the auxiliary entanglements is reduced from two to one by introducing time interval DOF. Moreover, the additional frequency and time interval DOFs suffer less from the collective channel noise.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Ze-Guo Wang, Shi-Jie Wei, Gui-Lu Long
    Frontiers of Physics, 2022, 17(4): 41501. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-021-1141-2

    Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is one of the most widely used block ciphers nowadays, and has been established as an encryption standard in 2001. Here we design AES-128 and the sample-AES (S-AES) quantum circuits for deciphering. In the quantum circuit of AES-128, we perform an affine transformation for the SubBytes part to solve the problem that the initial state of the output qubits in SubBytes is not the |0>⊗8 state. After that, we are able to encode the new round sub-key on the qubits encoding the previous round sub-key, and this improvement reduces the number of qubits used by 224 compared with Langenberg et al.’s implementation. For S-AES, a complete quantum circuit is presented with only 48 qubits, which is already within the reach of existing noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Peng Wang, Chang-Qi Yu, Zi-Xu Wang, Rui-Yang Yuan, Fang-Fang Du, Bao-Cang Ren
    Frontiers of Physics, 2022, 17(3): 31501. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-021-1120-7

    In quantum information processing, the quality of photon system is decreased by the inevitable interaction with environment, which will greatly reduce the efficiency and security of quantum information processing. In this paper, we propose hyperentanglement-assisted hyperdistillation schemes to guarantee the quality of hyper-encoding photon system based on the method of quantum hyper-teleportation, which can increase the success probability of hyperdistillation and reduce the resource consumption. First, we propose a hyperentanglement-assisted single-photon hyperdistillation (HASPHD) scheme for polarization and spatial qubits to get rid of the vacuum state component caused by transmission loss, whose success probability can achieve the optimal one by increasing the efficiency of quantum hyper-teleportation. Subsequently, we present two hyperentanglement-assisted hyperentanglement distillation (HAHED) schemes for photon system to protect hyperentanglement from both transmission loss and quantum channel noise, which can recover the less-entangled mixed state to maximally hyperentangled state for known-parameter and unknown-parameter cases with high success probability and low resource consumption. In these hyperdistillation schemes, the influence of imperfect effects of optical elements can be largely decreased by the quantum hyper-teleportation method. These characters make the hyperentanglement-assisted hyperdistillation schemes have potential application prospects in practical quantum information processing.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Pei-Shun Yan, Lan Zhou, Wei Zhong, Yu-Bo Sheng
    Frontiers of Physics, 2022, 17(2): 21501. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-021-1103-8

    The entangled coherent states (ECSs) have been widely used to realize quantum information processing tasks. However, the ECSs may suffer from photon loss and decoherence due to the inherent noise in quantum channel, which may degrade the fidelity of ECSs. To overcome these obstacles, we present a measurement-based entanglement purification protocol (MBEPP) for ECSs to distill some highquality ECSs from a large number of low-quality copies. We first show the principle of this MBEPP without considering the photon loss. After that, we prove that this MBEPP is feasible to correct the error resulted from the photon loss. Additionally, this MBEPP only requires to operate the Bell state measurement without performing local two-qubit gates on the noisy pairs and the purified high-quality ECSs can be preserved for other applications. This MBEPP may have application potential in the implementation of long-distance quantum communication.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Qi-Ping Su, Hanyu Zhang, Chui-Ping Yang
    Frontiers of Physics, 2021, 16(6): 61501. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-021-1098-1

    We present a way to transfer maximally- or partially-entangled states of n single-photon-state (SPS) qubits onto ncoherent-state (CS) qubits, by employing 2nmicrowave cavities coupled to a superconducting flux qutrit. The two logic states of a SPS qubit here are represented by the vacuum state and the single-photon state of a cavity, while the two logic states of a CS qubit are encoded with two coherent states of a cavity. Because of using only one superconducting qutrit as the coupler, the circuit architecture is significantly simplified. The operation time for the state transfer does not increase with the increasing of the number of qubits. When the dissipation of the system is negligible, the quantum state can be transferred in a deterministic way since no measurement is required. Furthermore, the higher-energy intermediate level of the coupler qutrit is not excited during the entire operation and thus decoherence from the qutrit is greatly suppressed. As a specific example, we numerically demonstrate that the high-fidelity transfer of a Bell state of two SPS qubits onto two CS qubits is achievable within the present-day circuit QED technology. Finally, it is worthy to note that when the dissipation is negligible, entangled states of n CS qubits can be transferred back onto n SPS qubits by performing reverse operations. This proposal is quite general and can be extended to accomplish the same task, by employing a natural or artificial atom to couple 2nmicrowave or optical cavities.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Wei-Xia Wu, Chen-Pu Li, Yan-Li Song, Ying-Rong Han, Zhi-Gang Zheng
    Frontiers of Physics, 2021, 16(3): 31500. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-021-1057-x

    Considering a double-headed Brownian motor moving with both translational and rotational degrees of freedom, we investigate the directed transport properties of the system in a traveling-wave potential. It is found that the traveling wave provides the essential condition of the directed transport for the system, and at an appropriate angular frequency, the positive current can be optimized. A general current reversal appears by modulating the angular frequency of the traveling wave, noise intensity, external driving force and the rod length. By transforming the dynamical equation in traveling-wave potential into that in a tilted potential, the mechanism of current reversal is analyzed. For both cases of Gaussian and Lévy noises, the currents show similar dependence on the parameters. Moreover, the current in the tilted potential shows a typical stochastic resonance effect. The external driving force has also a resonance-like effect on the current in the tilted potential. But the current in the traveling-wave potential exhibits the reverse behaviors of that in the tilted potential. Besides, the currents obviously depend on the stability index of the Lévy noise under certain conditions.