Memory effect on the formation of drying cracks

We propose a model for the formation of drying cracks in a viscoplastic material. In this model, we observe that when an external force is applied to a viscoplastic material before drying, the material memorizes the effect of the force as a plastic deformation. The formation of the drying cracks is influenced by this plastic deformation. This outcome clarifies the result of a recent experiments which demonstrated that a drying fracture pattern on a powder-water mixture depends on the manner in which an external force is applied before drying. We analytically express the position of the first crack as a function of the strength of an external force applied before drying. From the expression, we predict that there exists a threshold on the strength of the force. When the force applied is smaller than the threshold, the first crack is formed at the center of the mixture; however, when the force applied exceeds the threshold, the position of the first crack deviates from the center. The extent of the deviation increases as a linear function of the difference between the strength of the force and the threshold.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

Designing Robust Unitary Gates: Application to Concatenated Composite Pulse

We propose a simple formalism to design unitary gates robust against given systematic errors. This formalism generalizes our previous observation [Y. Kondo and M. Bando, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 80, 054002 (2011)] that vanishing dynamical phase in some composite gates is essential to suppress amplitude errors. By employing our formalism, we naturally derive a new composite unitary gate which can be seen as a concatenation of two known composite unitary operations. The obtained unitary gate has high fidelity over a wider range of the error strengths compared to existing composite gates.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Major revision: improved presentation in Sec. 3, references and appendix adde

Non-perturbative proton stability

Proton decay is a generic prediction of GUT models and is therefore an important channel to detect the existence of unification or to set limits on GUT models. Current bounds on the proton lifetime are around 10^33 years, which sets stringent limits on the GUT scale. These limits are obtained under `reasonable' assumptions about the size of the hadronic matrix elements. In this paper we present a non-perturbative calculation of the hadronic matrix elements within the chiral bag model of the proton. We argue that there is an exponential suppression of the matrix elements, due to non-perturbative QCD, that stifles proton decay by orders of magnitude -- potentially O(10^-10). This suppression is present for small quark masses and is due to the chiral symmetry breaking of QCD. Such a suppression has clear implications for GUT models and could resuscitate several scenarios

Dual Formulation of the Lie Algebra S-expansion Procedure

The expansion of a Lie algebra entails finding a new, bigger algebra G, through a series of well-defined steps, from an original Lie algebra g. One incarnation of the method, the so-called S-expansion, involves the use of a finite abelian semigroup S to accomplish this task. In this paper we put forward a dual formulation of the S-expansion method which is based on the dual picture of a Lie algebra given by the Maurer-Cartan forms. The dual version of the method is useful in finding a generalization to the case of a gauge free differential algebra, which in turn is relevant for physical applications in, e.g., Supergravity. It also sheds new light on the puzzling relation between two Chern-Simons Lagrangians for gravity in 2+1 dimensions, namely the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian and the one for the so-called "exotic gravity".Comment: 12 pages, no figure

Dynamical invariants for quantum control of four-level systems

We present a Lie-algebraic classification and detailed construction of the dynamical invariants, also known as Lewis-Riesenfeld invariants, of the four-level systems including two-qubit systems which are most relevant and sufficiently general for quantum control and computation. These invariants not only solve the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation of four-level systems exactly but also enable the control, and hence quantum computation based on which, of four-level systems fast and beyond adiabatic regimes.Comment: 11 pages, 5 table

Minimal and Robust Composite Two-Qubit Gates with Ising-Type Interaction

We construct a minimal robust controlled-NOT gate with an Ising-type interaction by which elementary two-qubit gates are implemented. It is robust against inaccuracy of the coupling strength and the obtained quantum circuits are constructed with the minimal number (N=3) of elementary two-qubit gates and several one-qubit gates. It is noteworthy that all the robust circuits can be mapped to one-qubit circuits robust against a pulse length error. We also prove that a minimal robust SWAP gate cannot be constructed with N=3, but requires N=6 elementary two-qubit gates.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Recursive Encoding and Decoding of Noiseless Subsystem and Decoherence Free Subspace

When the environmental disturbace to a quantum system has a wavelength much larger than the system size, all qubits localized within a small area are under action of the same error operators. Noiseless subsystem and decoherence free subspace are known to correct such collective errors. We construct simple quantum circuits, which implement these collective error correction codes, for a small number $n$ of physical qubits. A single logical qubit is encoded with $n=3$ and $n=4$, while two logical qubits are encoded with $n=5$. The recursive relations among the subspaces employed in noiseless subsystem and decoherence free subspace play essential r\^oles in our implementation. The recursive relations also show that the number of gates required to encode $m$ logical qubits increases linearly in $m$.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Strongly Correlated Topological Superconductors and Topological Phase Transitions via Green's Function

We propose several topological order parameters expressed in terms of Green's function at zero frequency for topological superconductors, which generalizes the previous work for interacting insulators. The coefficient in topological field theory is expressed in terms of zero frequency Green's function. We also study topological phase transition beyond noninteracting limit in this zero frequency Green's function approach.Comment: 10 pages. Published versio