Viscous Properties of a Degenerate One-Dimensional Fermi Gas.

We study the viscous properties of a system of weakly interacting spin-1/2 fermions in one dimension. Accounting for the effect of interactions on the quasiparticle energy spectrum, we obtain the bulk viscosity of this system at low temperatures. Our result is valid for frequencies that are small compared with the rate of fermion backscattering. For frequencies larger than this exponentially small rate, the excitations of the system become decoupled from the center of mass motion, and the fluid is described by two-fluid hydrodynamics. We calculate the three transport coefficients required to describe viscous dissipation in this regime.

Photon Pair Condensation by Engineered Dissipation.

Dissipation can usually induce detrimental decoherence in a quantum system. However, engineered dissipation can be used to prepare and stabilize coherent quantum many-body states. Here, we show that, by engineering dissipators containing photon pair operators, one can stabilize an exotic dark state, which is a condensate of photon pairs with a phase-nematic order. In this system, the usual superfluid order parameter, i.e., single-photon correlation, is absent, while the photon pair correlation exhibits long-range order. Although the dark state is not unique due to multiple parity sectors, we devise an additional type of dissipators to stabilize the dark state in a particular parity sector via a diffusive annihilation process which obeys Glauber dynamics in an Ising model. Furthermore, we propose an implementation of these photon pair dissipators in circuit-QED architecture.

Thermal management and non-reciprocal control of phonon flow via optomechanics.

Engineering phonon transport in physical systems is a subject of interest in the study of materials, and has a crucial role in controlling energy and heat transfer. Of particular interest are non-reciprocal phononic systems, which in direct analogy to electric diodes, provide a directional flow of energy. Here, we propose an engineered nanostructured material, in which tunable non-reciprocal phonon transport is achieved through optomechanical coupling. Our scheme relies on breaking time-reversal symmetry by a spatially varying laser drive, which manipulates low-energy acoustic phonons. Furthermore, we take advantage of developments in the manipulation of high-energy phonons through controlled scattering mechanisms, such as using alloys and introducing disorder. These combined approaches allow us to design an acoustic isolator and a thermal diode. Our proposed device will have potential impact in phonon-based information processing, and heat management in low temperatures.

A topological quantum optics interface.

The application of topology in optics has led to a new paradigm in developing photonic devices with robust properties against disorder. Although considerable progress on topological phenomena has been achieved in the classical domain, the realization of strong light-matter coupling in the quantum domain remains unexplored. We demonstrate a strong interface between single quantum emitters and topological photonic states. Our approach creates robust counterpropagating edge states at the boundary of two distinct topological photonic crystals. We demonstrate the chiral emission of a quantum emitter into these modes and establish their robustness against sharp bends. This approach may enable the development of quantum optics devices with built-in protection, with potential applications in quantum simulation and sensing.

Electrical and Thermal Transport in Inhomogeneous Luttinger Liquids.

We study the transport properties of long quantum wires by generalizing the Luttinger liquid approach to allow for the finite lifetime of the bosonic excitations. Our theory accounts for long-range disorder and strong electron interactions, both of which are common features of experiments with quantum wires. We obtain the electrical and thermal resistances and thermoelectric properties of such quantum wires and find a strong deviation from perfect conductance quantization. We cast our results in terms of the thermal conductivity and bulk viscosity of the electron liquid and give the temperature scale above which the transport can be described by classical hydrodynamics.

Charge fractionalization in a mesoscopic ring.

We study the fractionalization of an electron tunneling into a strongly interacting electronic one-dimensional ring. As a complement to transport measurements in quantum wires connected to leads, we propose noninvasive measures involving the magnetic field profile around the ring to probe this fractionalization. In particular, we show that the magnetic field squared produced by the electron and the power that it would induce in a detector exhibit anisotropic profiles that depend on the degree of fractionalization. We contrast true fractionalization with two other scenarios which could mimic it-quantum superposition and classical probabilistic electron insertion. We show that the proposed field-dependent measures and those of the persistent current can distinguish between these three scenarios.

Majorana fermions in superconducting 1D systems having periodic, quasiperiodic, and disordered potentials.

We present a unified study of the effect of periodic, quasiperiodic, and disordered potentials on topological phases that are characterized by Majorana end modes in one-dimensional p-wave superconducting systems. We define a topological invariant derived from the equations of motion for Majorana modes and, as our first application, employ it to characterize the phase diagram for simple periodic structures. Our general result is a relation between the topological invariant and the normal state localization length. This link allows us to leverage the considerable literature on localization physics and obtain the topological phase diagrams and their salient features for quasiperiodic and disordered systems for the entire region of parameter space.