42,138 research outputs found
Experimental investigation of the dynamics of entanglement: Sudden death, complementarity, and continuous monitoring of the environment
We report on an experimental investigation of the dynamics of entanglement
between a single qubit and its environment, as well as for pairs of qubits
interacting independently with individual environments, using photons obtained
from parametric down-conversion. The qubits are encoded in the polarizations of
single photons, while the interaction with the environment is implemented by
coupling the polarization of each photon with its momentum. A convenient Sagnac
interferometer allows for the implementation of several decoherence channels
and for the continuous monitoring of the environment. For an
initially-entangled photon pair, one observes the vanishing of entanglement
before coherence disappears. For a single qubit interacting with an
environment, the dynamics of complementarity relations connecting single-qubit
properties and its entanglement with the environment is experimentally
determined. The evolution of a single qubit under continuous monitoring of the
environment is investigated, demonstrating that a qubit may decay even when the
environment is found in the unexcited state. This implies that entanglement can
be increased by local continuous monitoring, which is equivalent to
entanglement distillation. We also present a detailed analysis of the transfer
of entanglement from the two-qubit system to the two corresponding
environments, between which entanglement may suddenly appear, and show
instances for which no entanglement is created between dephasing environments,
nor between each of them and the corresponding qubit: the initial two-qubit
entanglement gets transformed into legitimate multiqubit entanglement of the
Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) type.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures; only .ps was working, now .pdf is also
availabl
Self-* overload control for distributed web systems
Unexpected increases in demand and most of all flash crowds are considered
the bane of every web application as they may cause intolerable delays or even
service unavailability. Proper quality of service policies must guarantee rapid
reactivity and responsiveness even in such critical situations. Previous
solutions fail to meet common performance requirements when the system has to
face sudden and unpredictable surges of traffic. Indeed they often rely on a
proper setting of key parameters which requires laborious manual tuning,
preventing a fast adaptation of the control policies. We contribute an original
Self-* Overload Control (SOC) policy. This allows the system to self-configure
a dynamic constraint on the rate of admitted sessions in order to respect
service level agreements and maximize the resource utilization at the same
time. Our policy does not require any prior information on the incoming traffic
or manual configuration of key parameters. We ran extensive simulations under a
wide range of operating conditions, showing that SOC rapidly adapts to time
varying traffic and self-optimizes the resource utilization. It admits as many
new sessions as possible in observance of the agreements, even under intense
workload variations. We compared our algorithm to previously proposed
approaches highlighting a more stable behavior and a better performance.Comment: The full version of this paper, titled "Self-* through self-learning:
overload control for distributed web systems", has been published on Computer
Networks, Elsevier. The simulator used for the evaluation of the proposed
algorithm is available for download at the address:
http://www.dsi.uniroma1.it/~novella/qos_web
Resistance Monitoring
The problem considered was that of estimating the temperature field in a contaminated region of soil, using measurements of electrical potential and current and also of temperature, at accessible points such as the wells and electrodes and the soil surface.
On the timescale considered, essentially days, the equation for the electrical potential is static. At any given time the potential satisfies the equation . Time enters the equation only as a parameter since is temperature and hence time dependent.
The problem of finding when both the potential and the current density are known on the boundary of the domain is a standard inverse problem of long standing. It is known that the problem is ill posed and hence that an accurate numerical solution will be difficult especially when the input data is subject to measurement errors.
In this report we examine a possible method for solving the electrical inverse problem which could possibly be used in a time stepping algorithm when the conductivity changes little in each step.
Since we are also able to make temperature measurements there is also the possibility of examining an inverse problem for the temperature equation. There seems to be much less literature on this problem, which in our case is essentially, a first order equation with a heat source.(We neglect thermal conductivity, which is small compared with the convection). Combining the results of both inverse problems might give a more robust method of estimating the temperature in the soil
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