Wideband Optical Filters with Small Gap Coupled Subwavelength Metal Structures

In this letter, we show that the bandwidth of optical band-stop filters made of subwavelength metal structures can be significantly increased by the strong plasmonic near-field coupling through the corners of the periodic metal squares. The effect of small gap coupling on the spectral bandwidth is investigated by varying the gap size between the metal squares. An equivalent transmission line model is used to fit the transmission and reflection spectra of the metal filters. The transmission line model can characterize well the metal structures with the gap size larger than the near-field decay length. However, it fails to model the transmission and reflection spectra when the gap size reaches the decay range of the near-field in the small gaps

Confronting brane inflation with Planck and pre-Planck data

In this paper, we compare brane inflation models with the Planck data and the pre-Planck data (which combines WMAP, ACT, SPT, BAO and H0 data). The Planck data prefer a spectral index less than unity at more than 5\sigma confidence level, and a running of the spectral index at around 2\sigma confidence level. We find that the KKLMMT model can survive at the level of 2\sigma only if the parameter $\beta$ (the conformal coupling between the Hubble parameter and the inflaton) is less than $\mathcal{O}(10^{-3})$, which indicates a certain level of fine-tuning. The IR DBI model can provide a slightly larger negative running of spectral index and red tilt, but in order to be consistent with the non-Gaussianity constraints from Planck, its parameter also needs fine-tuning at some level.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Measurement-device-independent QKD with Modified Coherent State

The measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) protocol has been proposed for the purpose of removing the detector side channel attacks. Due to the multi-photon events of coherent states sources, real-life implementations of MDI-QKD protocol must employ decoy states to beat the photon-number-splitting attack. Decoy states for MDI-QKD based on the weak coherent states have been studied recently. In this paper, we propose to perform MDI-QKD protocol with modified coherent states (MCS) sources. We simulate the performance of MDI-QKD with the decoy states based on MCS sources. And our simulation indicates that both the secure-key rate and transmission distance can be improved evidently with MCS sources.The physics behind this improvement is that the probability of multi-photon events of the MCS is lower than that of weak coherent states while at the same time the probability of single-photon is higher

A note on on-line broadcast scheduling with deadlines

In this paper, we study an on-line broadcast scheduling problem with deadlines, in which the requests asking for the same page can be satisfied simultaneously by broadcasting this page, and every request is associated with a release time, deadline and a required page with a unit size. The objective is to maximize the number of requests satisfied by the schedule. In this paper, we focus on an important special case where all the requests have their spans (the difference between release time and deadline) less than 2. We give an optimal online algorithm, i.e., its competitive ratio matches the lower bound of the problem.postprin