Cooperative Shielding in Many-Body Systems with Long-Range Interaction.

In recent experiments with ion traps, long-range interactions were associated with the exceptionally fast propagation of perturbation, while in some theoretical works they have also been related with the suppression of propagation. Here, we show that such apparently contradictory behavior is caused by a general property of long-range interacting systems, which we name cooperative shielding. It refers to shielded subspaces that emerge as the system size increases and inside of which the evolution is unaffected by long-range interactions for a long time. As a result, the dynamics strongly depends on the initial state: if it belongs to a shielded subspace, the spreading of perturbation satisfies the Lieb-Robinson bound and may even be suppressed, while for initial states with components in various subspaces, the propagation may be quasi-instantaneous. We establish an analogy between the shielding effect and the onset of quantum Zeno subspaces. The derived effective Zeno Hamiltonian successfully describes the short-ranged dynamics inside the subspaces up to a time scale that increases with system size. Cooperative shielding can be tested in current experiments with trapped ions.

A Chirality-Based Quantum Leap.

There is increasing interest in the study of chiral degrees of freedom occurring in matter and in electromagnetic fields. Opportunities in quantum sciences will likely exploit two main areas that are the focus of this Review: (1) recent observations of the chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect in chiral molecules and engineered nanomaterials and (2) rapidly evolving nanophotonic strategies designed to amplify chiral light-matter interactions. On the one hand, the CISS effect underpins the observation that charge transport through nanoscopic chiral structures favors a particular electronic spin orientation, resulting in large room-temperature spin polarizations. Observations of the CISS effect suggest opportunities for spin control and for the design and fabrication of room-temperature quantum devices from the bottom up, with atomic-scale precision and molecular modularity. On the other hand, chiral-optical effects that depend on both spin- and orbital-angular momentum of photons could offer key advantages in all-optical and quantum information technologies. In particular, amplification of these chiral light-matter interactions using rationally designed plasmonic and dielectric nanomaterials provide approaches to manipulate light intensity, polarization, and phase in confined nanoscale geometries. Any technology that relies on optimal charge transport, or optical control and readout, including quantum devices for logic, sensing, and storage, may benefit from chiral quantum properties. These properties can be theoretically and experimentally investigated from a quantum information perspective, which has not yet been fully developed. There are uncharted implications for the quantum sciences once chiral couplings can be engineered to control the storage, transduction, and manipulation of quantum information. This forward-looking Review provides a survey of the experimental and theoretical fundamentals of chiral-influenced quantum effects and presents a vision for their possible future roles in enabling room-temperature quantum technologies.

Collective couplings: Rectification and supertransmittance.

We investigate heat transport between two thermal reservoirs that are coupled via a large spin composed of N identical two-level systems. One coupling implements the dissipative Dicke superradiance. The other coupling is locally of the pure-dephasing type and requires to go beyond the standard weak-coupling limit by employing a Bogoliubov mapping in the corresponding reservoir. After the mapping, the large spin is coupled to a collective mode with the original pure-dephasing interaction, but the collective mode is dissipatively coupled to the residual oscillators. Treating the large spin and the collective mode as the system, a standard master equation approach is now able to capture the energy transfer between the two reservoirs. Assuming fast relaxation of the collective mode, we derive a coarse-grained rate equation for the large spin only and discuss how the original Dicke superradiance is affected by the presence of the additional reservoir. Our main finding is a cooperatively enhanced rectification effect due to the interplay of supertransmittant heat currents (scaling quadratically with N) and the asymmetric coupling to both reservoirs. For large N, the system can thus significantly amplify current asymmetries under bias reversal, functioning as a heat diode. We also briefly discuss the case when the couplings of the collective spin are locally dissipative, showing that the heat-diode effect is still present.