Dissipative stabilization of quantum-feedback-based multipartite entanglement with Rydberg atoms Xiao-Qiang Shao,1 Jin-Hui Wu,1 and Xue-Xi Yi1 1Center for Quantum Sciences and School of Physics, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130024, Peoples Republic of China, and Center for Advanced Optoelectronic Functional Materials Research and Key Laboratory for UV Light-Emitting Materials and Technology of Ministry of Education, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130024, Peoples Republic of China A quantum-feedback-based scheme is proposed for generating multipartite entanglements of Rydberg atoms in a dissipative optical cavity. The Rydberg blockade mechanism efficiently prevents double excitations of the system, which is further exploited to speed up the stabilization of an entangled state with a single Rydberg state excitation. The corresponding feedback operations are greatly simplified, since only one regular atom needs to be controlled during the whole process, irrespective of the number of particles. The form of entangled state is also adjustable via regulating the Rabi frequencies of driving fields. Moreover, a relatively long-life time of the high-lying Rydberg level guarantees a high fidelity in a realistic situation. PACS numbers: 03.67.Bg, 03.65.Yz, 32.80.Qk, 32.80.Ee arXiv:1701.00081v1 [quant-ph] 31 Dec 2016 I. INTRODUCTION Quantum entanglement, formally proposed by Ervin Schr¨odinger, is defined to describe a strongly correlated system constituted by pairs or groups of particles [1]. This kind of correlation is so peculiar that a measurement made on either of the particles apparently collapses the state of system instantaneously, even when the particles are separated by a large distance. Although this `spooky action at a distance' has made Einstein thought that quantum mechanics is not a complete [2], the observations of quantum entanglement have been continuously demonstrated in experiments with linear photons system [3­5], cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) system [6, 7], and trapped ions systems [8­10], etc. Nowadays, quantum entanglement, as a fundamental feature in quantum mechanics, has greatly promoted the development of quantum information. There are several entangled states that appear often in theory and experiments. For two qubits, the four maximally entangled Bell states form a complete orthonormal basis of the Hilbert space [11], which play a fundamental role in Bell's theorem, and are also known as EPR pairs in quantum key distribution protocols [12, 13]. For three qubits or more, there are two inequivalent classes of maximally entangled states such as Greenberger-HorneZeilinger (GHZ) and W states, both of them provide stronger refutations of local realism and are more useful in quantum information processing (QIP) [14, 15]. Compared with the maximal entanglement, some nonmaximally entangled states possess more practical capability in certain QIP tasks. For instance, the idea of decoherence-free subspaces (DFS) was brought forward Corresponding author: shaoxq644@nenu.edu.cn to passively prevent the quantum system against a special class of decohrence [16­18]. The quantum information encoded into DFS could keep a unitary evolution of system, since they are decoupled from the environment. Due to the above properties, quantum entanglement has become the core of quantum information science, and researchers have devoted themselves to generate various of entangled states with high quality [19­22]. An intuitive and effective way for manipulation of quantum states is to design a quantum dynamic or adiabatic process that unitarily map an initial state to the target state. Nevertheless, the inevitable interaction between quantum system and its surrounding reservoir will destroy the coherence of quantum components, thus decoherence makes it an obstacle to preparing faithful and reliable entanglements in experiments [23, 24]. Fortunately, recent developments of technologies suggest that quantum feedback strategy can be taken advantage of controlling and overcoming entanglement degradation in open quantum system. Using approach of quantum trajectories [25], the theory of quantum-limited feedback for continuously monitored systems is characterized by a deterministic Markovian master equation, as the time delay in the feedback loop is negligible. This method was successfully exploited to enhance the steady-state entanglement of two atoms by homodyne-mediated feedback [26, 27], and the amount and the robustness of entanglement were substantially improved further via quantumjump-based quantum feedback [28­32]. In the later direct feedback schemes [28, 30], application of nonidentical feedback Hamiltonian, breaking the symmetry properties with respect to exchange of atoms, admits a single steady-state solution of the master equation for system. As a result, a maximally entangled state is always achievable from an arbitrary initial state. However, we note that the output entangled state is closely related to the angular momentum state with J = 0, where J is the total spin of system consisting of n equivalent 2 pseudospin-1/2 particles. This situation imposes a strict restriction on the parity of particle number n, which is not available to prepare any other kinds of multipartite entanglement. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme for stabilization of quantum-feedback-based entanglement with Rydberg atoms [33­39]. The advantage for adopting Rydberg atoms as qubits is twofold: On the one hand, an excited atom can cause sufficiently large energy shifts of Rydberg states in its neighboring atoms, thus the whole system is blockaded into a single excitation subspace at most. This blockade mechanism greatly reduces the dimension of investigated system and contributes to an analytical steady-state solution for the stochastic master equation. On the other hand, the Rydberg state with a large principle quantum number is able to live for a very long time, which admirably suits for being encoded quantum information. Furthermore, the form of entangled steady states is adjustable and the feedback control is applied simply on a regular atom, irrespective of the number of particles. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Sec. II, we derive an effective Hamiltonian of the interaction between multipartite cascade-type Rydberg atoms and a damped cavity. In Sec. III, we obtain an effective master equation describing atomic collective amplitude damping induced by a large cavity loss. In Sec. IV, we analytically and numerically investigate the effect of quantum feedback on preparation of bipartite-, tripartite-, and multipartite entanglement, respectively. In Sec. V, we discuss the experimental feasibility of our proposal and give a conclusion. II. EFFECTIVE PHYSICAL MODEL We consider multipartite Rydberg atoms with cascadetype configuration are trapped in an optical cavity, as shown in Fig. 1. Each atom is constituted by a Rydberg state |r , an optical state |p , and a ground state |g . The indirect transition from |g to |r mediated by |p is driven by two independent channels: In one channel, the atom is first coupled to the cavity mode with strength g, detuned by b, and then pumped by a classical field with Rabi frequency c, detuning -a. The other channel is totally composed by two laser fields, and the corresponding Rabi frequencies and detuings are R, -b, and B, a, respectively. All parameters are assumed to be real for the sake of simplicity. In the interaction picture, the Hamiltonian of the system reads ( = 1) N HI = [(geibta + iRe-iat)|p ii g| i=1 +(ice-ibt + iBeiat)|r ii p| + H.c.] N + Uij (r)|r ii r| |r jj r|, (1) i