ALICE is a general-purpose heavy-ion experiment designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter and the quark–gluon plasma in nucleus–nucleus collisions at the LHC. It currently involves more than 900 physicists and senior engineers, from both the nuclear and high-energy physics sectors, from over 90 institutions in about 30 countries.The ALICE detector is designed to cope with the highest particle multiplicities above those anticipated for Pb–Pb collisions (dNch/dy up to 8000) and it will be operational at the start-up of the LHC. In addition to heavy systems, the ALICE Collaboration will study collisions of lower-mass ions, which are a means of varying the energy density, and protons (both pp and pA), which primarily provide reference data for the nucleus–nucleus collisions. In addition, the pp data will allow for a number of genuine pp physics studies.The detailed design of the different detector systems has been laid down in a number of Technical Design Reports issued between mid-1998 and the end of 2004. The experiment is currently under construction and will be ready for data taking with both proton and heavy-ion beams at the start-up of the LHC.Since the comprehensive information on detector and physics performance was last published in the ALICE Technical Proposal in 1996, the detector, as well as simulation, reconstruction and analysis software have undergone significant development. The Physics Performance Report (PPR) provides an updated and comprehensive summary of the performance of the various ALICE subsystems, including updates to the Technical Design Reports, as appropriate.The PPR is divided into two volumes. Volume I, published in 2004 (CERN/LHCC 2003-049, ALICE Collaboration 2004 J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 30 1517–1763), contains in four chapters a short theoretical overview and an extensive reference list concerning the physics topics of interest to ALICE, the experimental conditions at the LHC, a short summary and update of the subsystem designs, and a description of the offline framework and Monte Carlo event generators.The present volume, Volume II, contains the majority of the information relevant to the physics performance in proton–proton, proton–nucleus, and nucleus–nucleus collisions. Following an introductory overview, Chapter 5 describes the combined detector performance and the event reconstruction procedures, based on detailed simulations of the individual subsystems. Chapter 6 describes the analysis and physics reach for a representative sample of physics observables, from global event characteristics to hard processes.

We introduce a complete Bell measurement on atomic qubits based on two photon interactions with optical cavities and discrimination of coherent states of light. The dynamical system is described by the Dicke model for two three-level atoms interacting in two-photon resonance with a single-mode of the radiation field, which is known to effectively generate a non-linear two-photon interaction between the field and two states of each atom. For initial coherent states with large mean photon number, the field state is well represented by two coherent states at half revival time. For certain product states of the atoms, we prove the coherent generation of GHZ states with two atomic qubits and two orthogonal Schrödinger cat states as a third qubit. For arbitrary atomic states, we show that discriminating the two states of the field corresponds to different operations in the Bell basis of the atoms. By repeating this process with a second cavity prepared in a phase-shifted coherent state, we demonstrate the implementation of a complete Bell measurement. Experimental feasibility of our protocols is discussed for cavity-QED, circuit-QED and trapped ions setups.

We construct deformed photon-added nonlinear coherent states (DPANCSs) by application of the deformed creation operator upon the nonlinear coherent states obtained as eigenstates of the deformed annihilation operator and by application of a deformed displacement operator upon the vacuum state. We evaluate some statistical properties like the Mandel parameter, Husimi, and Wigner functions for these states and analyze their differences; we give closed analytical expressions for them. We found a profound difference in the statistical properties of the DPANCSs obtained from the two abovementioned generalizations.

Knowledge of the relationships among different features of quantumness, like entanglement and state purity, is important from both fundamental and practical viewpoints. Yet, this issue remains little explored in dynamical contexts for open quantum systems. We address this problem by studying the dynamics of entanglement and purity for two-qubit systems using paradigmatic models of radiation-matter interaction, with a qubit being isolated from the environment (spectator configuration). We show the effects of the corresponding local quantum channels on an initial two-qubit pure entangled state in the concurrence–purity diagram and find the conditions which enable dynamical closed formulas of concurrence, used to quantify entanglement, as a function of purity. We finally discuss the usefulness of these relations in assessing entanglement and purity thresholds which allow noisy quantum teleportation. Our results provide new insights about how different properties of composite open quantum systems behave and relate each other during quantum evolutions

We study the dynamical Casimir effect in an electromagnetic cavity containing a Kerr medium. We obtain approximate expressions for the time evolution operator as well as for the number operator in the Heisenberg representation. We have found that the generation of photons from quantum vacuum is strongly affected by the presence of the Kerr medium, sharing physical features with the case of two two-level atoms in a cavity with oscillating walls. The nonlinear medium produces a saturation effect in the photon generation which shows strong oscillations whose frequency increases with the intensity of the nonlinear medium. We expect that these results could be relevant for any experimental study involving the dynamical Casimir effect that is willing to incorporate Kerr nonlinearities.