Observation and coherent control of interface-induced electronic resonances in a field-effect transistor.

Electronic defect states at material interfaces provide highly deleterious sources of noise in solid-state nanostructures, and even a single trapped charge can qualitatively alter the properties of short one-dimensional nanowire field-effect transistors (FET) and quantum bit (qubit) devices. Understanding the dynamics of trapped charge is thus essential for future nanotechnologies, but their direct detection and manipulation is rather challenging. Here, a transistor-based set-up is used to create and probe individual electronic defect states that can be coherently driven with microwave (MW) pulses. Strikingly, we resolve a large number of very high quality (Q ∼ 1 × 105) resonances in the transistor current as a function of MW frequency and demonstrate both long decoherence times (∼1 µs-40 µs) and coherent control of the defect-induced dynamics. Efficiently characterizing over 800 individually addressable resonances across two separate defect-hosting materials, we propose that their properties are consistent with weakly driven two-level systems.

Quench dynamics of a disordered array of dissipative coupled cavities.

We investigate the mean-field dynamics of a system of interacting photons in an array of coupled cavities in the presence of dissipation and disorder. We follow the evolution of an initially prepared Fock state, and show how the interplay between dissipation and disorder affects the coherence properties of the cavity emission, and show that these properties can be used as signatures of the many-body phase of the whole array.

Efficient biologically inspired photocell enhanced by delocalized quantum states.

Artificially implementing the biological light reactions responsible for the remarkably efficient photon-to-charge conversion in photosynthetic complexes represents a new direction for the future development of photovoltaic devices. Here, we develop such a paradigm and present a model photocell based on the nanoscale architecture and molecular elements of photosynthetic reaction centers. Quantum interference of photon absorption and emission induced by the dipole-dipole interaction between molecular excited states guarantees an enhanced light-to-current conversion and power generation for a wide range of electronic, thermal, and optical parameters for optimized dipolar geometries. This result opens a promising new route for designing artificial light-harvesting devices inspired by biological photosynthesis and quantum technologies.

Adiabatic state preparation of interacting two-level systems.

We consider performing adiabatic rapid passage (ARP) using frequency-swept driving pulses to excite a collection of interacting two-level systems. Such a model arises in a wide range of many-body quantum systems, such as cavity QED or quantum dots, where a nonlinear component couples to light. We analyze the one-dimensional case using the Jordan-Wigner transformation, as well as the mean-field limit where the system is described by a Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick Hamiltonian. These limits provide complementary insights into the behavior of many-body systems under ARP, suggesting our results are generally applicable. We demonstrate that ARP can be used for state preparation in the presence of interactions, and identify the dependence of the required pulse shapes on the interaction strength. In general, interactions increase the pulse bandwidth required for successful state transfer, introducing new restrictions on the pulse forms required.