Finite volume study of electric polarizabilities from lattice QCD

Knowledge of the electric polarizability is crucial to understanding the interactions of hadrons with electromagnetic fields. The neutron polarizability is very sensitive to the quark mass and is expected to diverge in the chiral limit. Here we present results for the electric polarizability of the neutron, neutral pion, and neutral kaon on eight ensembles with nHYP-smeared clover dynamical fermions with two different pion masses (227 and 306 MeV). These are currently the lightest pion masses used in polarizability studies. For each pion mass we compute the polarizability at four different volumes and perform an infinite volume extrapolation for the three hadrons. Along with the infinite volume extrapolation we conduct a chiral extrapolation for the kaon polarizability to the physical point. We compare our results for the neutron polarizability to predictions from chiral perturbation theory.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figure

Molecular basis of gap junctional communication in the CNS of the leech Hirudo medicinalis

Gap junctions are intercellular channels that allow the passage of ions and small molecules between cells. In the nervous system, gap junctions mediate electrical coupling between neurons. Despite sharing a common topology and similar physiology, two unrelated gap junction protein families exist in the animal kingdom. Vertebrate gap junctions are formed by members of the connexin family, whereas invertebrate gap junctions are composed of innexin proteins. Here we report the cloning of two innexins from the leech Hirudo medicinalis. These innexins show a differential expression in the leech CNS: Hm-inx1 is expressed by every neuron in the CNS but not in glia, whereas Hm-inx2 is expressed in glia but not neurons. Heterologous expression in the paired Xenopus oocyte system demonstrated that both innexins are able to form functional homotypic gap junctions. Hm-inx1 forms channels that are not strongly gated. In contrast, Hm-inx2 forms channels that are highly voltage-dependent; these channels demonstrate properties resembling those of a double rectifier. In addition, Hm-inx1 and Hm-inx2 are able to cooperate to form heterotypic gap junctions in Xenopus oocytes. The behavior of these channels is primarily that predicted from the properties of the constituent hemichannels but also demonstrates evidence of an interaction between the two. This work represents the first demonstration of a functional gap junction protein from a Lophotrochozoan animal and supports the hypothesis that connexin-based communication is restricted to the deuterostome clade

Geometric Aspects of Composite Pulses

Unitary operations acting on a quantum system must be robust against systematic errors in control parameters for reliable quantum computing. Composite pulse technique in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) realises such a robust operation by employing a sequence of possibly poor quality pulses. In this article, we demonstrate that two kinds of composite pulses, one compensates for a pulse length error in a one-qubit system and the other compensates for a J-coupling error in a twoqubit system, have vanishing dynamical phase and thereby can be seen as geometric quantum gates, which implement unitary gates by the holonomy associated with dynamics of cyclic vectors defined in the text.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

The intrinsic strangeness and charm of the nucleon using improved staggered fermions

We calculate the intrinsic strangeness of the nucleon, - , using the MILC library of improved staggered gauge configurations using the Asqtad and HISQ actions. Additionally, we present a preliminary calculation of the intrinsic charm of the nucleon using the HISQ action with dynamical charm. The calculation is done with a method which incorporates features of both commonly-used methods, the direct evaluation of the three-point function and the application of the Feynman- Hellman theorem. We present an improvement on this method that further reduces the statistical error, and check the result from this hybrid method against the other two methods and find that they are consistent. The values for and found here, together with perturbative results for heavy quarks, show that dark matter scattering through Higgs-like exchange receives roughly equal contributions from all heavy quark flavors.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figure