Manifestation of a nonclassical Berry phase of an electromagnetic field in atomic Ramsey interference

The Berry phase acquired by an electromagnetic field undergoing an adiabatic and cyclic evolution in phase space is a purely quantum-mechanical effect of the field. However, this phase is usually accompanied by a dynamical contribution and cannot be manifested in any light-beam interference experiment because it is independent of the field state. We here show that such a phase can be produced using an atom coupled to a quantized field and driven by a slowly changing classical field, and it is manifested in atomic Ramsey interference oscillations. We also show how this effect may be applied to one-step implementation of multiqubit geometric phase gates, which is impossible by previous geometric methods. The effects of dissipation and fluctuations in the parameters of the pump field on the Berry phase and visibility of the Ramsey interference fringes are analyzed

A committee machine gas identification system based on dynamically reconfigurable FPGA

This paper proposes a gas identification system based on the committee machine (CM) classifier, which combines various gas identification algorithms, to obtain a unified decision with improved accuracy. The CM combines five different classifiers: K nearest neighbors (KNNs), multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis function (RBF), Gaussian mixture model (GMM), and probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA). Experiments on real sensors' data proved the effectiveness of our system with an improved accuracy over individual classifiers. Due to the computationally intensive nature of CM, its implementation requires significant hardware resources. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a novel time multiplexing hardware implementation using a dynamically reconfigurable field programmable gate array (FPGA) platform. The processing is divided into three stages: sampling and preprocessing, pattern recognition, and decision stage. Dynamically reconfigurable FPGA technique is used to implement the system in a sequential manner, thus using limited hardware resources of the FPGA chip. The system is successfully tested for combustible gas identification application using our in-house tin-oxide gas sensors

Single grain (LRE)-Ba-Cu-O superconductors fabricated by top seeded melt growth in air

We have recently reported a practical processing method for the fabrication in air of large, single grain (LRE)-Ba-Cu-O [where LRE Nd, Sm, Eu and Gd] bulk superconductors that exhibit high Tc and high Jc. The process is based initially on the development of a new type of generic seed crystal that can promote effectively the epitaxial nucleation of any (RE)-Ba-Cu-O system and, secondly, by suppressing the formation of (LRE)/Ba solid solution in a controlled manner within large LRE-Ba-Cu-O grains processed in air. In this paper we investigate the degree of homogeneity of large grain Sm-Ba-Cu-O superconductors fabricated by this novel process. The technique offers a significant degree of freedom in terms of processing parameters and reproducibility in the growth of oriented single grains in air and yields bulk samples with significantly improved superconducting and field-trapping properties compared to those processed by conventional top seeded melt growth (TSMG)

Tensor Norms and the Classical Communication Complexity of Nonlocal Quantum Measurement

We initiate the study of quantifying nonlocalness of a bipartite measurement by the minimum amount of classical communication required to simulate the measurement. We derive general upper bounds, which are expressed in terms of certain tensor norms of the measurement operator. As applications, we show that (a) If the amount of communication is constant, quantum and classical communication protocols with unlimited amount of shared entanglement or shared randomness compute the same set of functions; (b) A local hidden variable model needs only a constant amount of communication to create, within an arbitrarily small statistical distance, a distribution resulted from local measurements of an entangled quantum state, as long as the number of measurement outcomes is constant.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appears as part of an article in Proceedings of the the 37th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2005), 460--467, 200

Quantum information transfer and models for black hole mechanics

General features of information transfer between quantum subsystems, via unitary evolution, are investigated, with applications to the problem of information transfer from a black hole to its surroundings. A particularly direct form of quantum information transfer is "subspace transfer," which can be characterized by saturation of a subadditivity inequality. We also describe more general unitary quantum information transfer, and categorize different models for black hole evolution. Evolution that only creates paired excitations inside/outside the black hole is shown not to extract information, but information-transferring models exist both in the "saturating" and "non-saturating" category. The former more closely capture thermodynamic behavior; the latter generically have enhanced energy flux, beyond that of Hawking.Comment: 31 pages, harvmac. v2: nomenclature change, minor added explanation. v3: small corrections/rewordings; improved figure; version to match publication in PR

Properties of nuclei in the nobelium region studied within the covariant, Skyrme, and Gogny energy density functionals

We calculate properties of the ground and excited states of nuclei in the nobelium region for proton and neutron numbers of 92 <= Z <= 104 and 144 <= N <= 156, respectively. We use three different energy-density-functional (EDF) approaches, based on covariant, Skyrme, and Gogny functionals, each within two different parameter sets. A comparative analysis of the results obtained for odd-even mass staggerings, quasiparticle spectra, and moments of inertia allows us to identify single-particle and shell effects that are characteristic to these different models and to illustrate possible systematic uncertainties related to using the EDF modellingComment: 43 LaTeX pages, 14 figures, accepted in Nuclear Physics A, Special Issue on Superheavy Element