We study the emergence of synchronisation in a chiral network of harmonic oscillators. The network consists of a set of locally incoherently pumped harmonic oscillators coupled pairwise in cascade with travelling field modes. Such cascaded coupling leads to feedback-less dissipative interaction between the harmonic oscillators of the pair which can be described in terms of an effective pairwise Hamiltonian a collective pairwise decay. The network is described mathematically in terms of a directed graph. By analysing geometries of increasing complexity we show how the onset of synchronisation depends strongly on the network topology, with the emergence of synchronised communities in the case of complex networks. The quantum nature of the non local correlation between network nodes is assessed.

We find the minimum and the maximum value for the local energy of an arbitrary finite bipartite system for any given amount of entanglement, also identifying families of states reaching these bounds and sharing formal analogies with thermal states. Then, we numerically study the probability of randomly generating pure states close to these energy bounds finding, in all the considered configurations, that it is extremely low except for the two-qubit and highly degenerate cases. These results can be important in quantum technologies to design energetically more efficient protocols.

Quantum technologies exploiting bipartite entanglement could be made more efficient by using states having the minimum amount of energy for a given entanglement degree. Here, we study how to generate these states in the case of a bipartite system of arbitrary finite dimension either by applying a unitary transformation to its ground state or through a zero-temperature thermalization protocol based on turning on and off a suitable interaction term between the subsystems. In particular, we explicitly identify three possible unitary operators and five possible interaction terms. On one hand, two of the three unitary transformations turn out to be easily decomposable in terms of local elementary operations and a single nonlocal one, making their implementation easier. On the other hand, since the thermalization procedures can be easily adapted to generate many different states, we numerically show that, for each degree of entanglement, generating minimum-energy entangled states costs, in general, less than generating the vast majority of the other states.

In the general framework of $d_1\times d_2$ mixed states, we derive an explicit bound for bipartite negative partial transpose (NPT) entanglement based on the mixedness characterization of the physical system. The derived result is very general, being based only on the assumption of finite dimensionality. In addition, it turns out to be of experimental interest since some purity-measuring protocols are known. Exploiting the bound in the particular case of thermal entanglement, a way to connect thermodynamic features to the monogamy of quantum correlations is suggested, and some recent results on the subject are given a physically clear explanation.

The Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage, a very efficient technique for manipulating a quantum system based on the adiabatic theorem, is analyzed in the case where the manipulated physical system is interacting with a spin bath. The exploitation of the rotating wave approximation allows for the identification of a constant of motion, which simplifies both the analytical and the numerical treatment, which allows for evaluating the total unitary evolution of the system and bath. The efficiency of the population transfer process is investigated in several regimes, including the weak and strong coupling with the environment and the off-resonance. The formation of appropriate Zeno subspaces explains the lowering of the efficiency in the strong damping regime.

The stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is applied to a system coupled to a bath made of fully interacting two-level systems whose dynamics is studied by exploiting the generalized cluster correlation expansion (gCCE) theory. We specialize our analysis to a negatively charged silicon vacancy (${\mathrm{V}}_{\mathrm{Si}}^{-1}$) in nonpurified 4H-SiC to assess the possibility of transferring population between two states of the ground manifold, also taking into account the interaction with a spherical nuclear-spin bath formed by nuclei of ${}^{29}\mathrm{Si}$ and ${}^{13}\mathrm{C}$. For this system, it is demonstrated that the presence of a small- or medium-sized bath has no effect on the protocol, finding in particular a set of parameter values for an efficient STIRAP process.