We study the radiative heat transfer between multilayer structures made by a periodic repetition of a graphene sheet and a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) slab. Surface plasmons in a monolayer graphene can couple with hyperbolic phonon polaritons in a single hBN film to form hybrid polaritons that can assist photon tunneling. For periodic multilayer graphene/hBN structures, the stacked metallic/dielectric array can give rise to a further effective hyperbolic behavior, in addition to the intrinsic natural hyperbolic behavior of hBN. The effective hyperbolicity can en- able more hyperbolic polaritons that enhance the photon tunneling and hence the near-field heat transfer. However, the hybrid polaritons on the surface, i.e., surface plasmon-phonon polaritons, dominate the near-field heat transfer between multilayer structures when the topmost layer is graphene. The effective hyperbolic regions can be well predicted by the effective medium theory (EMT), thought EMT fails to capture the hybrid surface polaritons and results in a heat trans- fer rate much lower compared to the exact calculation. The chemical potential of the graphene sheets can be tuned through electrical gating and results in an additional modulation of the heat transfer. We found that the near-field heat transfer between multilayer structures does not increase monotonously with the number of layers in the stack, which provides a way to control the heat transfer rate by the number of graphene layers in the multilayer structure. The results may benefit the applications of near-field energy harvesting and radiative cooling based on hybrid polaritons in two-dimensional materials.

We investigate the quantum recoil force acting on an excited atom close to the surface of a nonreciprocal photonic topological insulator (PTI). The main atomic emission channel is the unidirectional surface plasmon propagating at the PTI-vacuum interface, and we show that it enables a spontaneous lateral recoil force that scales at short distances as 1/d^4, where d is the atom-PTI separation. Remarkably, the sign of the recoil force is polarization and orientation independent, and it occurs in a translation-invariant homogeneous system in thermal equilibrium. Surprisingly, the recoil force persists for very small values of the gyration pseudovector, which, for a biased plasma, corresponds to very low cyclotron frequencies. The ultrastrong recoil force is rooted in the quasihyperbolic dispersion of the surface plasmons. We consider both an initially excited atom and a continuous pump scenario, the latter giving rise to a steady lateral force whose direction can be changed at will by simply varying the orientation of the biasing magnetic field. Our predictions may be tested in experiments with cold Rydberg atoms and superconducting qubits.

We propose a system made of three quantum harmonic oscillators as a compact quantum engine for producing mechanical work. The three oscillators play respectively the role of the hot bath, the working medium and the cold bath. The working medium performs an Otto cycle during which its frequency is changed and it is sequentially coupled to each of the two other oscillators. As the two environments are finite, the lifetime of the machine is finite and after a number of cycles it stops working and needs to be reset. Remarkably, we show that thismachine can extract more than 90% of the available energy during 70 cycles. Differently from usually investigated infinite-reservoir configurations, this machine allows the protection of induced quantum correlations and we analyse the entanglement and quantum discord generated during the strokes. Interestingly, we show that high work generation is always accompanied by large quantum correlations. Our predictions can be useful for energy management at the nanoscale, and can be relevant for experiments with trapped ions and experiments with light in integrated optical circuits.

We theoretically study the Casimir-Polder force on an atom in an arbitrary initial state in a rather general electromagnetic environment wherein the materials may have a nonreciprocal bianisotropic dispersive response. It is shown that under the Markov approximation the force has resonant and nonresonant contributions. We obtain explicit expressions for the optical force both in terms of the system Green function and of the electromagnetic modes. We apply the theory to the particular case wherein a two-level system interacts with a topological gyrotropic material, showing that the nonreciprocity enables exotic light-matter interactions and the opportunity to sculpt and tune the Casimir-Polder forces on the nanoscale. With a quasistatic approximation, we obtain a simple analytical expression for the optical force and unveil the crucial role of surface plasmons in fluctuation-induced forces. Finally, we derive the Green function for a gyrotropic material half-space in terms of a Sommerfeld integral.

We will discuss recent results on the theoretical and experimental investigations on solitons in a superfluid Fermi gas along the BCS-BEC crossover. On the theory side, by solving the Bogoliubov de Gennes equations and looking for real and odd solutions for the order parameter, it has been shown that a dark soliton at unitarity posses a large density contrast and fermionic bound states. The superfluid gap is found to be significantly quenched by the presence of the soliton due to the occurrence of Andreev fermionic bound states localized near the nodal plane of the order parameter. By solving the time dependent Bogoliubov de Gennes equations, also the decay and collisions of dark solitons has been investigated. Recently, a cascade of Solitonic Excitations in a Superfluid Fermi gas has been experimentally observed.

Radiative heat transfer between nanostructured objects is a new prolific research line, which open to new heat transfer modulation and amplification possibilities. We will consider the heat transfer between micro/nano-gratings. In particular, we calculate the radiative heat transfer between two identical metallic one-dimensional lamellar gratings [1]. To this aim we present and exploit a modification to the widely-used Fourier modal method, known as adaptive spatial resolution, based on a stretch of the coordinate associated to the periodicity of the grating. We first show that this technique dramatically improves the rate of convergence when calculating the heat flux, allowing to explore smaller separations. We then present a study of heat flux as a function of the grating height, highlighting a remarkable amplification of the exchanged energy, ascribed to the appearance of spoof-plasmon modes, whose behavior is also spectrally investigated. Differently from previous works, our method allows us to explore a range of grating heights extending over several orders of magnitude. By comparing our results to recent studies we find a consistent quantitative disagreement with some previously obtained results going up to 50%. In some cases, this disagreement is explained in terms of an incorrect connection between the reflection operators of the two gratings.

We investigate the transport of energy in a linear chain of two-level quantum emitters ("atoms")weakly coupled to a blackbody radiation bath [1]. We show that, simply by displacing one ormore atoms from their regular-chain positions, the efficiency of the energy transport can beconsiderably amplified of at least one order of magnitude. Besides, in configurations providingan efficiency greater than 100% , the distance between the two last atoms of the chain canbe up to 20 times larger than the one in the regular chain, thus achieving a much longer-rangeenergy transport. By performing both a stationary and time-dependent analysis, we ascribethis effect to an elementary block of three atoms, playing the role of excitation injector fromthe blackbody bath to the extraction site. By considering chains with up to 7 atoms, we alsoshow that the amplification is robust and can be further enhanced up to 1400%.-------------------------[1] P. Doyeux, R. Messina, B. Leggio, and M. Antezza, Phys. Rev. A 95, 012138 (2017).