Quantum wire hybridized with a single-level impurity

Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference with a Single Atom

The Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect is widely regarded as the quintessential quantum interference phenomenon in optics. In this work we examine how nonlinearity can smear statistical photon bunching in the HOM interferometer. We model both the nonlinearity and a balanced beam splitter with a single two-level system and calculate a finite probability of anti-bunching arising in this geometry. We thus argue that the presence of such nonlinearity would reduce the visibility in the standard HOM setup, offering some explanation for the diminution of the HOM visibility observed in many experiments. We use the same model to show that the nonlinearity affects a resonant two-photon propagation through a two-level impurity in a waveguide due to a “weak photon blockade” caused by the impossibility of double-occupancy and argue that this effect might be stronger for multi-photon propagation.

One-dimensional transport of bosons between weakly linked reservoirs

We study a flow of ultracold bosonic atoms through a one-dimensional channel that connects two macroscopic three-dimensional reservoirs of Bose-condensed atoms via weak links implemented as potential barriers between each of the reservoirs and the channel. We consider reservoirs at equal chemical potentials so that a superflow of the quasicondensate through the channel is driven purely by a phase difference 2Φ imprinted between the reservoirs. We find that the superflow never has the standard Josephson form ∼sin2Φ. Instead, the superflow discontinuously flips direction at 2Φ=±π and has metastable branches. We show that these features are robust and not smeared by fluctuations or phase slips. We describe a possible experimental setup for observing these phenomena.

Duality of weak and strong scatterer in a Luttinger liquid coupled to massless bosons

We study electronic transport in a Luttinger liquid with an embedded impurity, which is either a weak scatterer (WS) or a weak link (WL), when interacting electrons are coupled to one-dimensional massless bosons (e.g., acoustic phonons). We find that the duality relation, ΔWSΔWL=1, between scaling dimensions of the electron backscattering in the WS and WL limits, established for the standard Luttinger liquid, holds in the presence of the additional coupling for an arbitrary fixed strength of boson scattering from the impurity. This means that at low temperatures such a system remains either an ideal insulator or an ideal metal, regardless of the scattering strength. On the other hand, when fermion and boson scattering from the impurity are correlated, the system has a rich phase diagram that includes a metal-insulator transition at some intermediate values of the scattering.

Duality between different geometries of a resonant level in a Luttinger liquid

We prove an exact duality between the side-coupled and embedded geometries of a single level quantum dot attached to a quantum wire in a Luttinger liquid phase by a tunneling term and interactions. This is valid even in the presence of a finite bias voltage. Under this relation the Luttinger liquid parameter g goes into its inverse, and transmittance maps onto reflectance. We then demonstrate how this duality is revealed by the transport properties of the side-coupled case. Conductance is found to exhibit an antiresonance as a function of the level energy, whose width vanishes (enhancing transport) as a power law for low temperature and bias voltage whenever g > 1, and diverges (suppressing transport) for g < 1. On-resonance transmission is always destroyed, unless g is large enough.