Last Week Papers (14th week 2012)

It feels good to be back in an office and able to follow the literature. I'm thinking that I like the list format and now will split it in two: published and pre-prints because it is good to talk about pre-prints.

Published

• "Quantum Interface between an Electrical Circuit and a Single Atom" by  D. Kielpinski,  et. al., Physical Review Letters 108, 130504 (2012)
  
  
  They have shown it may be possible to couple an ion to a quantized current from a superconducting circuit. That's nice as the experiments in classical coupling of currents and ions can be used to build upon them and get to this. Interesting read.

• "Optical Detection of the Quantization of Collective Atomic Motion" by N. Brahams et. al., Physical Review Letters 108, 133601 (2012).
  
  
  They are measuring the collective motion of a gas coupled to a cavity field. That impresses me.


• "Superradiance in spin- j particles: Effects of multiple levels" by G._D Lin and S. F. Yelin, Physical Review A 85, 033831 (2012).
  
  
  It has always been a problem to talk about superradiance in two-level systems. Physically sound models with two-level systems involve Raman pumping to auxiliary levels in 4-levels schemes. It has always been mentioned that it may be possible to have superradiance with multi-level atoms. Well, they calculate it and show the effect of multi-level atoms in radiance, decay and so on...


• " A heuristic approach to BEC self-trapping  in double wells beyond the mean field" by K. Rapedius,  Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics 45, 085303 (2012).


A semi-classical analysis of the Bose-Hubbard dimer Hamiltonian with some curious variations that seem to help producing some approximations that may be valid in the mean-field and finite particle number cases.

  
• "Effects of orbital angular momentum on the geometric spin Hall effect of light" by L.-J. Kong, Physical Review Letters 85, 035804(2012).
  
  
  Reading it and trying to figure it out... I have never read about the spin Hall effect of light and it seems like there are two different kinds: one at a gradient refractive index interface and another that is geometric and relates to observation from a frame tilted with respect to the propagation direction. I need to read more about all this things.

Preprints

• "Exact real-time dynamics of the quantum Rabi model" by F.A. Wolf, M. Kollar, and D. Braak, arXiv: 1203.6039v1 [quant-ph].
  
  
  Last year Braak wrote a very nice PRL where he presented the proper system of Rabi model; now, this follow-up paper builds upon the basis presented before and analyses the dynamical behavior in different time regimes. I wonder why nobody cites E. A. Tur's papers on approximations to the eigenvalues of Rabi model. Anyway,  This manuscript is quite interesting and a must read if you work in Quantum Optics.  


• "Quantum thermometry using the ac Stark shift within the Rabi model" by K.D.B. Higgins, B.W. Lovett, and E.M. Gauger, arXiv: 1203.5994v1 [quant-ph].
  
  
  I have the feeling that whenever I get to grasp what they are doing I'm gonna like it.