Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item FEW-BODY UNIVERSALITY IN WAVEGUIDE QUANTUM ELECTRODYNAMICS(2021) Wang, Yidan; Gorshkov, Alexey AVG; Gullans, Michael MJG; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Photons are elementary particles of light, and their interactions in vacuum are extremely weak. The seclusion of photons makes them perfect carriers of classical and quantum information, but also poses difficulties for employing them in quantum information technologies. Recent years have seen tremendous experimental progress in the development of synthetic quantum systems where strong and controllable coupling between single photons is achieved. In a variety of solid-state and optical platforms, propagating photons are coupled with local emitters such as atoms, quantum dots, NV centers, or superconducting qubits. Despite the different nature of the platforms, many of these systems can be described using the same theoretical framework called waveguide quantum electrodynamics (WQED). Dissipation is an inevitable ingredient of many synthetic quantum systems and is a source of error in quantum information applications. Despite its important role in experimental systems, the implications of dissipation in scattering theory havenot been fully explored. Chapter 2 discusses our discovery of the dissipation-induced bound states in WQED systems. The appearance of these bound states is in a one-to-one correspondence with zeros in the single-photon transmission. We also formulate a dissipative version of Levinson's theorem by looking at the relation between the number of bound states and the winding number of the transmission phases. In Chapter 3, we study three-body loss in Rydberg polaritons. Despite past theoretical and experimental studies of the regime with dispersive interaction, the dissipative regime is still mostly unexplored. Using a renormalization group technique to solve the quantum three-body problem, we show how the shape and strength of dissipative three-body forces can be universally enhanced for Rydberg polaritons. We demonstrate how these interactions relate to the transmission through a single-mode cavity, which can be used as a probe of the three-body physics in current experiments. The high level of control of the synthetic quantum systems behind WQED offers many inspirations for theoretical studies. In Chapter 4 of this dissertation, we explore a new direction of scattering theory motivated by the controllability of dispersion relations in synthetic quantum systems. We study single-particle scattering in one dimension when the dispersion relation is E(k)=k^m, where m>= 2 is an integer. For a large class of interactions, we discover that the S-matrix evaluated at an energy E->0 converges to a universal limit that is only dependent on m. We also give a generalization of Levinson's theorem for these more general dispersion relations in WQED systems.Item Dissipation in a superfluid atom circuit(2017) Lee, Jeffrey Garver; Hill, Wendell T; Chemical Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bose-Einstein condensates of weakly interacting dilute atomic gases provide a unique system with which to study phenomena associated with superfluidity. The simplicity of these systems allows us to study the fundamental physics of superfluidity without having to consider the strong interactions present in other superfluid systems such as superconductors and liquid helium. While condensate-based studies have been around for 20 years, our novel approach to confining ultracold atoms has opened a completely new range of parameter space to investigate. Armed with an ability for straightforward creation of arbitrary, time-dependent potential landscapes in which to study superfluid interactions, we were able to take a closer look at predictions of superfluid behavior that are decades old, but until now have never been tested directly. The purpose of this research was to draw direct analogies between superfluid BEC systems, which we term superfluid atom circuits, and existing superconducting circuits, thus allowing us to take advantage of much of the existing knowledge that has come from this well-studied field. Specifically, existing circuits and devices that have been created with superconductors give us insight into what might be possible someday with atom-circuit devices and inspiration to create them. In these experiments, we employed two different atom circuits; one classical (thermal ideal gas) and one quantum (ultracold superfluid). Our results show that each system is equivalent to an electronic circuit consisting of a capacitor being discharged through an inductor in series with some dissipative element. In the thermal system, dissipation can be described in terms of simple resistive flow with the resistance equivalent to ballistic, Sharvin resistance seen in electronic circuits. The superfluid measurements show that the dissipation is best described as a resistance-shunted Josephson junction, which is an analogue to similar devices in superconducting circuits. Additionally, the specific geometry of the atom circuit we used in our superfluid system allowed us to investigate directly a predicted mechanism responsible for the dissipation in superfluids caused by the generation of collective excitations, namely vortices. Direct observation of this mechanism has not previously been possible in superfluid helium and superconducting systems.