496 research outputs found
Optical implementation and entanglement distribution in Gaussian valence bond states
We study Gaussian valence bond states of continuous variable systems,
obtained as the outputs of projection operations from an ancillary space of M
infinitely entangled bonds connecting neighboring sites, applied at each of
sites of an harmonic chain. The entanglement distribution in Gaussian valence
bond states can be controlled by varying the input amount of entanglement
engineered in a (2M+1)-mode Gaussian state known as the building block, which
is isomorphic to the projector applied at a given site. We show how this
mechanism can be interpreted in terms of multiple entanglement swapping from
the chain of ancillary bonds, through the building blocks. We provide optical
schemes to produce bisymmetric three-mode Gaussian building blocks (which
correspond to a single bond, M=1), and study the entanglement structure in the
output Gaussian valence bond states. The usefulness of such states for quantum
communication protocols with continuous variables, like telecloning and
teleportation networks, is finally discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures. To appear in Optics and Spectroscopy, special
issue for ICQO'2006 (Minsk). This preprint contains extra material with
respect to the journal versio
The quantum marginal problem for symmetric states: applications to variational optimization, nonlocality and self-testing
In this paper, we present a method to solve the quantum marginal problem for symmetric d-level systems. The method is built upon an efficient semi-definite program that uses the compatibility conditions of an m-body reduced density with a global n-body density matrix supported on the symmetric space. We illustrate the applicability of the method in central quantum information problems with several exemplary case studies. Namely, (i) a fast variational ansatz to optimize local Hamiltonians over symmetric states, (ii) a method to optimize symmetric, few-body Bell operators over symmetric states and (iii) a set of sufficient conditions to determine which symmetric states cannot be self-tested from few-body observables. As a by-product of our findings, we also provide a generic, analytical correspondence between arbitrary superpositions of n-qubit Dicke states and translationally-invariant diagonal matrix product states of bond dimension n
Nonlinear time-series analysis revisited
In 1980 and 1981, two pioneering papers laid the foundation for what became
known as nonlinear time-series analysis: the analysis of observed
data---typically univariate---via dynamical systems theory. Based on the
concept of state-space reconstruction, this set of methods allows us to compute
characteristic quantities such as Lyapunov exponents and fractal dimensions, to
predict the future course of the time series, and even to reconstruct the
equations of motion in some cases. In practice, however, there are a number of
issues that restrict the power of this approach: whether the signal accurately
and thoroughly samples the dynamics, for instance, and whether it contains
noise. Moreover, the numerical algorithms that we use to instantiate these
ideas are not perfect; they involve approximations, scale parameters, and
finite-precision arithmetic, among other things. Even so, nonlinear time-series
analysis has been used to great advantage on thousands of real and synthetic
data sets from a wide variety of systems ranging from roulette wheels to lasers
to the human heart. Even in cases where the data do not meet the mathematical
or algorithmic requirements to assure full topological conjugacy, the results
of nonlinear time-series analysis can be helpful in understanding,
characterizing, and predicting dynamical systems
Exploring the Kibble-Zurek mechanism with homogeneous Bose gases
Out-of-equilibrium phenomena is a subject of considerable interest in many
fields of physics. Ultracold quantum gases, which are extremely clean,
well-isolated and highly controllable systems, offer ideal platforms to
investigate this topic. The recent progress in tailoring trapping potentials
now allows the experimental production of homogeneous samples in custom
geometries, which is a key advance for studies of the emergence of coherence in
interacting quantum systems. Here we review recent experiments in which
temperature quenches have been performed across the Bose-Einstein condensation
(BEC) phase transition in an annular geometry and in homogeneous 3D and
quasi-2D gases. Combined, these experiments give a comprehensive picture of the
Kibble-Zurek (KZ) scenario through complementary measurements of correlation
functions and topological defects density. They also allow the measurement of
KZ scaling laws, the direct confirmation of the "freeze-out" hypothesis that
underlies the KZ theory, and the extraction of critical exponents of the
Bose-Einstein condensation transition.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures; topical revie
Valence Bonds in Random Quantum Magnets: Theory and Application to YbMgGaO4
We analyze the effect of quenched disorder on spin-1/2 quantum magnets in
which magnetic frustration promotes the formation of local singlets. Our
results include a theory for 2d valence-bond solids subject to weak bond
randomness, as well as extensions to stronger disorder regimes where we make
connections with quantum spin liquids. We find, on various lattices, that the
destruction of a valence-bond solid phase by weak quenched disorder leads
inevitably to the nucleation of topological defects carrying spin-1/2 moments.
This renormalizes the lattice into a strongly random spin network with
interesting low-energy excitations. Similarly when short-ranged valence bonds
would be pinned by stronger disorder, we find that this putative glass is
unstable to defects that carry spin-1/2 magnetic moments, and whose residual
interactions decide the ultimate low energy fate. Motivated by these results we
conjecture Lieb-Schultz-Mattis-like restrictions on ground states for
disordered magnets with spin-1/2 per statistical unit cell. These conjectures
are supported by an argument for 1d spin chains. We apply insights from this
study to the phenomenology of YbMgGaO, a recently discovered triangular
lattice spin-1/2 insulator which was proposed to be a quantum spin liquid. We
instead explore a description based on the present theory. Experimental
signatures, including unusual specific heat, thermal conductivity, and
dynamical structure factor, and their behavior in a magnetic field, are
predicted from the theory, and compare favorably with existing measurements on
YbMgGaO and related materials.Comment: v2: Stylistic revisions to improve clarity. 22 pages, 8 figures, 2
tables main text; 13 pages, 3 figures appendice
Higher-Order Representations for Visual Recognition
In this thesis, we present a simple and effective architecture called Bilinear Convolutional Neural Networks (B-CNNs). These networks represent an image as a pooled outer product of features derived from two CNNs and capture localized feature interactions in a translationally invariant manner. B-CNNs generalize classical orderless texture-based image models such as bag-of-visual-words and Fisher vector representations. However, unlike prior work, they can be trained in an end-to-end manner. In the experiments, we demonstrate that these representations generalize well to novel domains by fine-tuning and achieve excellent results on fine-grained, texture and scene recognition tasks. The visualization of fine-tuned convolutional filters shows that the models are able to capture highly localized attributes. We present a texture synthesis framework that allows us to visualize the pre-images of fine-grained categories and the invariances that are captured by these models.
In order to enhance the discriminative power of the B-CNN representations, we investigate normalization techniques for rescaling the importance of individual features during aggregation. Spectral normalization scales the spectrum of the covariance matrix obtained after bilinear pooling and offers a significant improvement. However, the computation involves singular value decomposition, which is not computationally efficient on modern GPUs. We present an iteration-based approximation of matrix square-root along with its gradients to speed up the computation and study its effect on fine-tuning deep neural networks. Another approach is democratic aggregation, which aims to equalize the contributions of individual feature vector into the final pooled image descriptor. This achieves a comparable improvement, and can be approximated in a low-dimensional embedding unlike the spectral normalization. Therefore, this approach is friendly to aggregating higher-dimensional features. We demonstrate that the two approaches are closely related, and we discuss their trade-off between performance and efficiency
Detecting correlations among functional-sequence motifs
Sequence motifs are words of nucleotides in DNA with biological functions, e.g., gene regulation. Identification of such words proceeds through rejection of Markov models on the expected motif frequency along the genome. Additional biological information can be extracted from the correlation structure among patterns of motif occurrences. In this paper a log-linear multivariate intensity Poisson model is estimated via expectation maximization on a set of motifs along the genome of E. coli K12. The proposed approach allows for excitatory as well as inhibitory interactions among motifs and between motifs and other genomic features like gene occurrences. Our findings confirm previous stylized facts about such types of interactions and shed new light on genome-maintenance functions of some particular motifs. We expect these methods to be applicable to a wider set of genomic features
Model Cortical Association Fields Account for the Time Course and Dependence on Target Complexity of Human Contour Perception
Can lateral connectivity in the primary visual cortex account for the time dependence and intrinsic task difficulty of human contour detection? To answer this question, we created a synthetic image set that prevents sole reliance on either low-level visual features or high-level context for the detection of target objects. Rendered images consist of smoothly varying, globally aligned contour fragments (amoebas) distributed among groups of randomly rotated fragments (clutter). The time course and accuracy of amoeba detection by humans was measured using a two-alternative forced choice protocol with self-reported confidence and variable image presentation time (20-200 ms), followed by an image mask optimized so as to interrupt visual processing. Measured psychometric functions were well fit by sigmoidal functions with exponential time constants of 30-91 ms, depending on amoeba complexity. Key aspects of the psychophysical experiments were accounted for by a computational network model, in which simulated responses across retinotopic arrays of orientation-selective elements were modulated by cortical association fields, represented as multiplicative kernels computed from the differences in pairwise edge statistics between target and distractor images. Comparing the experimental and the computational results suggests that each iteration of the lateral interactions takes at least ms of cortical processing time. Our results provide evidence that cortical association fields between orientation selective elements in early visual areas can account for important temporal and task-dependent aspects of the psychometric curves characterizing human contour perception, with the remaining discrepancies postulated to arise from the influence of higher cortical areas
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