The Dynamics of Internet Traffic: Self-Similarity, Self-Organization, and Complex Phenomena

The Internet is the most complex system ever created in human history. Therefore, its dynamics and traffic unsurprisingly take on a rich variety of complex dynamics, self-organization, and other phenomena that have been researched for years. This paper is a review of the complex dynamics of Internet traffic. Departing from normal treatises, we will take a view from both the network engineering and physics perspectives showing the strengths and weaknesses as well as insights of both. In addition, many less covered phenomena such as traffic oscillations, large-scale effects of worm traffic, and comparisons of the Internet and biological models will be covered.Comment: 63 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables, submitted to Advances in Complex System

Dynamical Pion Collapse and the Coherence of Conventional Neutrino Beams

In this paper we consider the coherence properties of neutrinos produced by the decays of pions in conventional neutrino beams. Using a multi-particle density matrix formalism we derive the oscillation probability for neutrinos emitted by a decaying pion in an arbitrary quantum state. Then, using methods from decoherence theory we calculate the pion state which evolves through interaction with decay-pipe gases in a typical accelerator neutrino experiment. These two ingredients are used to obtain the distance scales for neutrino beam coherence loss. We find that for the known neutrino mass splittings, no non-standard oscillation effects are expected on terrestrial baselines. Heavy sterile neutrinos may experience terrestrial loss of coherence, and we calculate both the distance over which this occurs and the energy resolution required to observe the effect. By treating the pion-muon-neutrino-environment system quantum mechanically, neutrino beam coherence properties are obtained without assuming arbitrary spatial or temporal scales at the neutrino production vertex.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures. v2: Minor typographical corrections v3: Accepted for publication in Phys.Rev.

Quantum nondemolition detection of a propagating microwave photon

The ability to nondestructively detect the presence of a single, traveling photon has been a long-standing goal in optics, with applications in quantum information and measurement. Realising such a detector is complicated by the fact that photon-photon interactions are typically very weak. At microwave frequencies, very strong effective photon-photon interactions in a waveguide have recently been demonstrated. Here we show how this type of interaction can be used to realize a quantum nondemolition measurement of a single propagating microwave photon. The scheme we propose uses a chain of solid-state 3-level systems (transmons), cascaded through circulators which suppress photon backscattering. Our theoretical analysis shows that microwave-photon detection with fidelity around 90% can be realized with existing technologies