Exploring the validity of the problem solving inventory with Mexican American high school students

http://www.cambio.missouri.edu/Library/The Problem Solving Inventory (PSI; Heppner & Petersen, 1982) is a widely used measure to assess one's perceived ability in problem-solving behaviors and attitudes in the United States and many other countries. In this study, a bilevel model was examined with a Mexican American high school student sample (N = 164) using confirmatory factor analysis. Results of the confirmatory factor analysis supported the bilevel model with the current sample of Mexican American high school students. The data provided support for the PSI and enhances the generalizability of some of the previous findings based on the U.S., Turkish, and South African samples. Also, this study provides crosscultural information that promotes our knowledge about the efficacy of problem-solving constructs across different age and cultural groups.Dr. Lisa Flores, Thesis Superviso

Distilling Quantum Entanglement via Mode-Matched Filtering

We propose a new avenue towards distillation of quantum entanglement that is implemented by directly passing the entangled qubits through a mode-matched filter. This approach can be applied to a common class of entanglement impurities appearing in photonic systems where the impurities inherently occupy different spatiotemporal modes than the entangled qubits. As a specific application, we show that our method can be used to significantly purify the telecom-band entanglement generated via the Kerr nonlinearity in single-mode fibers where a substantial amount of Raman-scattering noise is concomitantly produced.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.