Biochemical prevention and treatment of viral infections – A new paradigm in medicine for infectious diseases

For two centuries, vaccination has been the dominating approach to develop prophylaxis against viral infections through immunological prevention. However, vaccines are not always possible to make, are ineffective for many viral infections, and also carry certain risk for a small, yet significant portion of the population. In the recent years, FDA's approval and subsequent market acceptance of Synagis, a monoclonal antibody indicated for prevention and treatment of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has heralded a new era for viral infection prevention and treatment. This emerging paradigm, herein designated "Biochemical Prevention and Treatment", currently involves two aspects: (1) preventing viral entry via passive transfer of specific protein-based anti-viral molecules or host cell receptor blockers; (2) inhibiting viral amplification by targeting the viral mRNA with anti-sense DNA, ribozyme, or RNA interference (RNAi). This article summarizes the current status of this field

Quantum information processing architecture with endohedral fullerenes in a carbon nanotube

A potential quantum information processor is proposed using a fullerene peapod, i.e., an array of the endohedral fullerenes 15N@C60 or 31P@C60 contained in a single walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT). The qubits are encoded in the nuclear spins of the doped atoms, while the electronic spins are used for initialization and readout, as well as for two-qubit operations.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure

Scalable quantum information processing with atomic ensembles and flying photons

We present a scheme for scalable quantum information processing (QIP) with atomic ensembles and flying photons. Using the Rydberg blockade, we encode the qubits in the collective atomic states, which could be manipulated fast and easily due to the enhanced interaction, in comparison to the single-atom case. We demonstrate that our proposed gating could be applied to generation of two-dimensional cluster states for measurement-based quantum computation. Moreover, the atomic ensembles also function as quantum repeaters useful for long distance quantum state transfer. We show the possibility of our scheme to work in bad cavity or in weak coupling regime, which could much relax the experimental requirement. The efficient coherent operations on the ensemble qubits enable our scheme to be switchable between quantum computation and quantum communication using atomic ensembles.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

One-step implementation of multi-qubit conditional phase gating with nitrogen-vacancy centers coupled to a high-Q silica microsphere cavity

The diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is an excellent candidate for quantum information processing, whereas entangling separate NV centers is still of great experimental challenge. We propose an one-step conditional phase flip with three NV centers coupled to a whispering-gallery mode cavity by virtue of the Raman transition and smart qubit encoding. As decoherence is much suppressed, our scheme could work for more qubits. The experimental feasibility is justified.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, Accepted by Appl. Phys. Let