Enhanced squeezing of a collective spin via control of its qudit subsystems.

Unitary control of qudits can improve the collective spin squeezing of an atomic ensemble. Preparing the atoms in a state with large quantum fluctuations in magnetization strengthens the entangling Faraday interaction. The resulting increase in interatomic entanglement can be converted into metrologically useful spin squeezing. Further control can squeeze the internal atomic spin without compromising entanglement, providing an overall multiplicative factor in the collective squeezing. We model the effects of optical pumping and study the tradeoffs between enhanced entanglement and decoherence. For realistic parameters we see improvements of ~10 dB.

Strongly enhanced spin squeezing via quantum control.

We describe a new approach to spin squeezing based on a double-pass Faraday interaction between an optical probe and an optically dense atomic sample. A quantum eraser is used to remove residual spin-probe entanglement, thereby realizing a single-axis twisting unitary map on the collective spin. This interaction can be phase matched, resulting in exponential enhancement of squeezing as a function of optical density for times short compared to the decoherence time. In practice the scaling and peak squeezing depends on decoherence, technical loss, and noise. Including these imperfections, our model indicates that ∼10 dB of squeezing should be achievable with laboratory parameters.

Entanglement and the generation of random states in the quantum chaotic dynamics of kicked coupled tops.

We study the dynamical generation of entanglement as a signature of chaos in a system of periodically kicked coupled tops, where chaos and entanglement arise from the same physical mechanism. The long-time-averaged entanglement as a function of the position of an initially localized wave packet very closely correlates with the classical phase space surface of section--it is nearly uniform in the chaotic sea, and reproduces the detailed structure of the regular islands. The uniform value in the chaotic sea is explained by the random state conjecture. As classically chaotic dynamics take localized distributions in phase space to random distributions, quantized versions take localized coherent states to pseudorandom states in Hilbert space. Such random states are highly entangled, with an average value near that of the maximally entangled state. For a map with global chaos, we derive that value based on analytic results for the entropy of random states. For a mixed phase space, we use the Percival conjecture to identify a "chaotic subspace" of the Hilbert space. The typical entanglement, averaged over the unitarily invariant Haar measure in this subspace, agrees with the long-time-averaged entanglement for initial states in the chaotic sea. In all cases the dynamically generated entanglement is that of a random complex vector, even though the system is time-reversal invariant, and the Floquet operator is a member of the circular orthogonal ensemble.