Measurement-Based Deterministic Imaginary Time Evolution.

We introduce a method to perform imaginary time evolution in a controllable quantum system using measurements and conditional unitary operations. By performing a sequence of weak measurements based on the desired Hamiltonian constructed by a Suzuki-Trotter decomposition, an evolution approximating imaginary time evolution can be realized. The randomness due to measurement is corrected using conditional unitary operations, making the evolution deterministic. Both the measurements required for the algorithm and the conditional unitary operations can be constructed efficiently. We show that the algorithm converges only below a specified energy threshold and the complexity is estimated for some specific problem instances.

Theory of single-shot phase contrast imaging in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates.

We introduce a theoretical framework for single-shot phase contrast imaging (PCI) measurements of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). Our model allows for the simple calculation of the quantum backaction resulting from the measurement, and the amount of information that is read out. We find that there is an optimum time Gτ ∼ 1/N for the light-matter interaction (G is the ac Stark shift frequency, N is the number of particles in the BEC), where the maximum amount of information can be read out from the BEC. A universal information-disturbance tradeoff law ε(F)ε(G) ∝ 1/N(2) is found where ε(F) is the amount of backaction and ε(G) is the estimation error. The PCI measurement can also be found to be a direct probe of the quantum fluctuations of the BEC, via the noise of the PCI signal.