In Bohmian mechanics, the nodes of the wave function play an important role in the generation of chaos. However, so far, most of the attention has been on moving nodes; little is known about the possibility of chaos in the case of stationary nodes. We address this question by considering stationary states, which provide the simplest examples of wave functions with stationary nodes. We provide examples of stationary wave functions for which there is chaos, as demonstrated by numerical computations, for one particle moving in 3 spatial dimensions and for two and three entangled particles in two dimensions. Our conclusion is that the motion of the nodes is not necessary for the generation of chaos. What is important is the overall complexity of the wave function. That is, if the wave function, or rather its phase, has complex spatial variations, it will lead to complex Bohmian trajectories and hence to chaos. Another aspect of our work concerns the average Lyapunov exponent, which quantifies the overall amount of chaos. Since it is very hard to evaluate the average Lyapunov exponent analytically, which is often computed numerically, it is useful to have simple quantities that agree well with the average Lyapunov exponent. We investigate possible correlations with quantities such as the participation ratio and different measures of entanglement, for different systems and different families of stationary wave functions. We find that these quantities often tend to correlate to the amount of chaos. However, the correlation is not perfect, because, in particular, these measures do not depend on the form of the basis states used to expand the wave function, while the amount of chaos does.

We analyze the influence of dipole-dipole interactions between Rydberg atoms on the generation of Abelian artificial gauge potentials and fields. When two Rydberg atoms are driven by a uniform laser field, we show that the combined atom-atom and atom-field interactions give rise to new, nonuniform, artificial gauge potentials. We identify the mechanism responsible for the emergence of these gauge potentials. Analytical expressions for the latter indicate that the strongest artificial magnetic fields are reached in the regime intermediate between the dipole blockade regime and the regime in which the atoms are sufficiently far apart such that atom-light interaction dominates over atom-atom interactions. We discuss the differences and similarities of artificial gauge fields originating from resonant dipole-dipole and van der Waals interactions. We also give an estimation of experimentally attainable artificial magnetic fields resulting from this mechanism and we discuss their detection through the deflection of the atomic motion.

Arrays of qubits encoded in the ground-state manifold of neutral atoms trapped in optical (or magnetic) lattices appear to be a promising platform for the realization of a scalable quantum computer. Two-qubit conditional gates between nearest-neighbor qubits in the array can be implemented by exploiting the Rydberg blockade mechanism, as was shown by D. Jaksch et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 2208 (2000)]. However, the energy shift due to dipole-dipole interactions causing the blockade falls off rapidly with the interatomic distance and protocols based on direct Rydberg blockade typically fail to operate between atoms separated by more than one lattice site. In this work, we propose an extension of the protocol of Jaksch \emph{et al.}\ for controlled-Z and controlled-NOT gates which works in the general case where the qubits are not nearest-neighbor in the array. Our proposal relies on the Rydberg excitation hopping along a chain of ancilla non-coding atoms connecting the qubits on which the gate is to be applied. The dependence of the gate fidelity on the number of ancilla atoms, the blockade strength and the decay rates of the Rydberg states is investigated. A comparison between our implementation of distant controlled-NOT gate and one based on a sequence of nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates is also provided.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

We study analytically the non-Markovianity of a spin ensemble, with arbitrary number of spins and spin quantum number, undergoing a pure dephasing dynamics. The system is considered as a part of a larger spin ensemble of any geometry with pairwise interactions. We derive exact formulas for the reduced dynamics of the system and for its non-Markovianity as assessed by the witness of Lorenzo et al. [Phys. Rev. A 88, 020102(R) (2013)]. The non-Markovianity is further investigated in the thermodynamic limit when the environment's size goes to infinity. In this limit and for finite-size systems, we find that the Markovian's character of the system's dynamics crucially depends on the range of the interactions. We also show that, when the system and its environment are initially in a product state, the appearance of non-Markovianity is independent of the entanglement generation between the system and its environment. arXiv:1803.04519v2 [quant-ph]