Publications of Diego Porras Torre

We introduce a driven-dissipative Bose-Hubbard chain describing coupled lossy photonic modes, in which time-reversal symmetry is broken by a coherent drive with a uniform phase gradient. We investigate this model by means of a Gaussian variational ansatz and numerically prove that the steady-state solution is stabilized by an inhomogeneous profile of the driving amplitude, which damps out boundary effects. Our calculations unveil a non-equilibrium phase diagram showing low- and high-density phases for photons separated by a phase coexistence region in which the system exhibits the phenomenon of topological amplification and is characterized by a finite non-Hermitian winding number. Our work shows the emergence of non-Hermitian topological phases in an interacting model that can be naturally implemented with superconducting circuits.

The Jahn-Teller effect explains distortions and non-degenerate energy levels in molecular and solid-state physics via a coupling of effective spins to collective bosons. Here we propose and theoretically analyze the quantum simulation of a many-body Jahn-Teller model with linear ion crystals subjected to magnetic field gradients. We show that the system undergoes a quantum magnetic structural phase transition which leads to a reordering of particle positions and the formation of a spin-phonon quasi-condensate in mesoscopic ion chains.

Tracking a financial index boils down to replicating its trajectory of returns for a well-defined time span by investing in a weighted subset of the securities included in the benchmark. Picking the optimal combination of assets becomes a challenging NP-hard problem even for moderately large indices consisting of dozens or hundreds of assets, thereby requiring heuristic methods to find approximate solutions. Hybrid quantum-classical optimization with variational gate-based quantum circuits arises as a plausible method to improve performance of current schemes. In this work we introduce a heuristic pruning algorithm to find weighted combinations of assets subject to cardinality constraints. We further consider different strategies to respect such constraints and compare the performance of relevant quantum ans\”{a}tze and classical optimizers through numerical simulations.

We present a topological approach to the input-output relations of photonic driven-dissipative lattices acting as directional amplifiers. Our theory relies on a mapping from the optical non-Hermitian coupling matrix to an effective topological insulator Hamiltonian. This mapping is based on the singular value decomposition of non-Hermitian coupling matrices, whose inverse matrix determines the linear input-output response of the system. In topologically non-trivial regimes, the input-output response of the lattice is dominated by singular vectors with zero singular values that are the equivalent of zero-energy states in topological insulators, leading to directional amplification of a coherent input signal. In such topological amplification regime, our theoretical framework allows us to fully characterize the amplification properties of the quantum device such as gain, bandwidth, added noise, and noise-to-signal ratio. We exemplify our ideas in a one-dimensional non-reciprocal photonic lattice, for which we derive fully analytical predictions. We show that the directional amplification is near quantum-limited with a gain growing exponentially with system size, $N$, while the noise-to-signal ratio is suppressed as $1/\sqrt{N}$. This points out to interesting applications of our theory for quantum signal amplification and single-photon detection.

Josephson effects are commonly studied in quantum systems in which dissipation or noise can be neglected or do not play a crucial role. In contrast, here we discuss a setup where dissipative interactions do amplify a photonic Josephson current, opening a doorway to dissipation-enhanced sensitivity of quantum-optical interferometry devices. In particular, we study two coupled nanolasers subjected to phase coherent drivings and coupled by a coherent photon tunneling process. We describe this system by means of a Fokker-Planck equation and show that it exhibits an interesting non-equilibrium phase diagram as a function of the coherent coupling between nanolasers. As we increase that coupling, we find a non-equilibrium phase transition between a phase-locked and a non-phase-locked steady-state, in which phase coherence is destroyed by the photon tunneling process. In the coherent, phase-locked regime, an imbalanced photon number population appears if there is a phase difference between the nanolasers, which appears in the steady-state as a result of the competition between competing local dissipative dynamics and the Josephson photo-current. The latter is amplified for large incoherent pumping rates and it is also enchanced close to the lasing phase transition. We show that the Josephson photocurrent can be used to measure optical phase differences. In the quantum limit, the accuracy of the two nanolaser interferometer grows with the square of the photon number and, thus, it can be enhanced by increasing the rate of incoherent pumping of photons into the nanolasers.

We present a characterization of topological phases in photonic lattices. Our theory relies on a formal equivalence between the singular value decomposition of the non-Hermitian coupling matrix and the diagonalization of an effective Hamiltonian. By means of that mapping we unveil an application of topological band theory to the description of quantum amplification with non-reciprocal systems. We exemplify our ideas with an array of photonic cavities which can be mapped into a topological insulator Hamiltonian in the AIII symmetry class. We investigate stability properties and prove the existence of stable topologically non-trivial steady-state phases. Finally, we show numerically that the topological amplification process is robust against disorder in the lattice parameters.

The quantum compass model consists of a two-dimensional square spin lattice where the orientation of the spin-spin interactions depends on the spatial direction of the bonds. It has remarkable symmetry properties and the ground state shows topological degeneracy. The implementation of the quantum compass model in quantum simulation setups like ultracold atoms and trapped ions is far from trivial, since spin interactions in those sytems typically are independent of the spatial direction. Ising spin interactions, on the contrary, can be induced and controlled in atomic setups with state-of-the art experimental techniques. In this work, we show how the quantum compass model on a rectangular lattice can be simulated by the use of the photon-assisted tunneling induced by periodic drivings on a quantum Ising spin model. We describe a procedure to adiabatically prepare one of the doubly-degenerate ground states of this model by adiabatically ramping down a transverse magnetic field, with surprising differences depending on the parity of the lattice size. Exact diagonalizations confirm the validity of this approach for small lattices. Specific implementations of this scheme are presented with ultracold atoms in optical lattices in the Mott insulator regime, as well as with Rydberg atoms.

We show that inducing sidebands in the emission of a single emitter into a one dimensional waveguide, together with a dissipative re-pumping process, a photon field is cooled down to a squeezed vacuum. Our method does not require to be in the strong coupling regime, works with a continuum of propagating field modes and it may lead to sources of tunable multimode squeezed light in circuit QED systems.