G. S. Agarwal

Superradiance is one of the outstanding problems in quantum optics since Dicke introduced the concept of enhanced directional spontaneous emission by an ensemble of identical two-level atoms. The effect is based on correlated collective Dicke states which turn out to be highly entangled. Here we show that enhanced directional emission of spontaneous radiation can be produced also with statistically independent incoherent sources via the measurement of higher order correlation functions of the emitted radiation. Our analysis is applicable to a wide variety of quantum systems like trapped atoms, ions, quantum dots or NV-centers, and is also valid for statistically independent incoherent classical emitters. This is experimentally confirmed with up to eight independent thermal light sources.

We study competition between the dissipative and coherent effects in the entanglement dynamics of two qubits. The coherent interactions are needed for designing logic gate operations with systems like ion traps, semicondutor quantum dots and atoms. We show that the interactions lead to a phenomenon of periodic disentanglement and entanglement between the qubits. The disentanglement is primarily caused by environmental perturbations. The qubits are seen to remain disentangled for a finite time before getting entangled again. We find that the phenomenon is generic and occurs for wide variety of models of the environment. We present analytical results for the time dependence of concurrence for all the models. The periodic disentanglement and entanglement behavior is seen to be precursor to the sudden death of entanglement (ESD) and can happen, for environments which do not show ESD for noninteracting qubits. Further we also find that this phenomenon can even lead to delayed death of entanglement for correlated environments.

We present new experimental implications of the effects of vacuum induced coherence on the photon -photon correlation in the pi-polarized fluorescence in j = 1/2 to j = 1/2 transition. These effects should be thus observable in measurements of photon statistics in for example Hg and Ba ion traps.

A collective system of atoms in a high quality cavity can be described by a nonlinear interaction which arises due to the Lamb shift of the energy levels due to the cavity vacuum [Agarwal et al., Phys. Rev. A 56, 2249 (1997)]. We show how this collective interaction can be used to perform quantum logic. In particular we produce schemes to realize CNOT gates not only for two-qubit but also for three-qubit systems. We also discuss realizations of Toffoli gates. Our effective Hamiltonian is also realized in other systems such as trapped ions or magnetic molecules.

We discuss a simple search problem which can be pursued with different methods, either on a classical or on a quantum basis. The system is represented by a chain of trapped ions. The ion to be searched is a member of that chain, consists, however, of an isotopic species different to the others. It is shown that the classical imaging may lead as fast to the final result as the quantum imaging. However, for the discussed case the quantum method gives more flexibility and higher precision when the number of ions considered in the chain is increasing. In addition, interferences are observable even when the distances between the ions is smaller than half a wavelength of the incident light.

We show that in parametrically driven systems and, more generally, in systems in coherent states, off-resonant pumping can cause a transition from a continuum energy spectrum of the system to a discrete one, and result in quantum revivals of the initial state. The mechanism responsible for quantum revivals in the present case is different from that in the non-linear wavepacket dynamics of systems such as Rydberg atoms. We interpret the reported phenomena as an optical analog of Bloch oscillations realized in Fock space and propose a feasible scheme for inducing Bloch oscillations in trapped ions.

We demonstrate in a very general fashion, considerable slowing down of decoherence and relaxation by fast frequency modulation of the system heat bath coupling. The slowing occurs as the decoherence rates are now determined by the spectral components of bath correlations which are shifted due to fast modulation. We present several examples including the slowing down of the heating of a trapped ion, where the system - bath interaction is not necessarily Markovian.