"If You Can't Beat them, Join them": A Usability Approach to Interdependent Privacy in Cloud Apps

Cloud storage services, like Dropbox and Google Drive, have growing ecosystems of 3rd party apps that are designed to work with users' cloud files. Such apps often request full access to users' files, including files shared with collaborators. Hence, whenever a user grants access to a new vendor, she is inflicting a privacy loss on herself and on her collaborators too. Based on analyzing a real dataset of 183 Google Drive users and 131 third party apps, we discover that collaborators inflict a privacy loss which is at least 39% higher than what users themselves cause. We take a step toward minimizing this loss by introducing the concept of History-based decisions. Simply put, users are informed at decision time about the vendors which have been previously granted access to their data. Thus, they can reduce their privacy loss by not installing apps from new vendors whenever possible. Next, we realize this concept by introducing a new privacy indicator, which can be integrated within the cloud apps' authorization interface. Via a web experiment with 141 participants recruited from CrowdFlower, we show that our privacy indicator can significantly increase the user's likelihood of choosing the app that minimizes her privacy loss. Finally, we explore the network effect of History-based decisions via a simulation on top of large collaboration networks. We demonstrate that adopting such a decision-making process is capable of reducing the growth of users' privacy loss by 70% in a Google Drive-based network and by 40% in an author collaboration network. This is despite the fact that we neither assume that users cooperate nor that they exhibit altruistic behavior. To our knowledge, our work is the first to provide quantifiable evidence of the privacy risk that collaborators pose in cloud apps. We are also the first to mitigate this problem via a usable privacy approach.Comment: Authors' extended version of the paper published at CODASPY 201

Phase Separation in Bose-Fermi-Fermi Mixtures as a Probe of Fermi Superfluidity

We study the phase diagram of a mixture of Bose-Einstein condensate and a two-component Fermi gas. In particular, we identify the regime where the homogeneous system becomes unstable against phase separation. We show that, under proper conditions, the phase separation phenomenon can be exploited as a robust probe of Fermi superfluid

Spontaneous spin textures in dipolar spinor condensates

We have mapped out a detailed phase diagram that shows the ground state structure of a spin-1 condensate with magnetic dipole-dipole interactions. We show that the interplay between the dipolar and the spin-exchange interactions induces a rich variety of quantum phases that exhibit spontaneous magnetic ordering in the form of intricate spin textures.Comment: 4.1 pages, 4 figure

Abnormal enhancement of electric field inside a thin permittivity-near-zero object in free space

It is found that the electric field can be enhanced strongly inside a permittivity-near-zero object in free space, when the transverse cross section of the object is small and the length along the propagation direction of the incident wave is large enough as compared with the wavelength. The physical mechanism is explained in details. The incident electromagnetic energy can only flow almost normally through the outer surface into or out of the permittivity-near-zero object, which leads to large energy stream density and then strong electric field inside the object. Meanwhile, the magnetic field inside the permittivity-near-zero object may be smaller than that of the incident wave, which is also helpful for enhancing the electric field. Two permittivity-near-zero objects of simple shapes, namely, a thin cylindrical shell and a long thin rectangular bar, are chosen for numerical illustration. The enhancement of the electric field becomes stronger when the permittivity-near-zero object becomes thinner. The physical mechanism of the field enhancement is completely different from the plasmonic resonance enhancement at a metal surface

Squeezing electromagnetic energy with a dielectric split ring inside a permeability-near-zero metamaterial

A novel electromagnetic energy squeezing mechanism is proposed based on the special properties of permeability-near-zero metamaterials. Nearly no energy stream can enter a conventional dielectric region positioned inside a permeability-near-zero material. When a source is surrounded by a dielectric split ring (encloser with a gap opened), the electromagnetic energy generated by the source is forced to propagate through the gap. When the gap is narrow, the energy stream density becomes very large and makes the magnetic field enhanced drastically in the gap. The narrow gap can be long and bended. This provides us a method to obtain strong magnetic field without using resonance enhancement.Comment: 17pages, 4 figure

Number-conserving interacting fermion models with exact topological superconducting ground states

We present a method to construct number-conserving Hamiltonians whose ground states exactly reproduce an arbitrarily chosen BCS-type mean-field state. Such parent Hamiltonians can be constructed not only for the usual $s$-wave BCS state, but also for more exotic states of this form, including the ground states of Kitaev wires and 2D topological superconductors. This method leads to infinite families of locally-interacting fermion models with exact topological superconducting ground states. After explaining the general technique, we apply this method to construct two specific classes of models. The first one is a one-dimensional double wire lattice model with Majorana-like degenerate ground states. The second one is a two-dimensional $p_x+ip_y$ superconducting model, where we also obtain analytic expressions for topologically degenerate ground states in the presence of vortices. Our models may provide a deeper conceptual understanding of how Majorana zero modes could emerge in condensed matter systems, as well as inspire novel routes to realize them in experiment.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; supplement: 4 pages, 1 figur

Finite-Temperature Study of Bose-Fermi Superfluid Mixtures

Ultra-cold atom experiments offer the unique opportunity to study mixing of different types of superfluid states. Our interest is in superfluid mixtures comprising particles with different statistics- Bose and Fermi. Such scenarios occur naturally, for example, in dense QCD matter. Interestingly, cold atomic experiments are performed in traps with finite spatial extent, thus critically destabilizing the occurrence of various homogeneous phases. Critical to this analysis is the understanding that the trapped system can undergo phase separation, resulting in a unique situation where phase transition in either species (bosons or fermions) can overlap with the phase separation between possible phases. In the present work, we illustrate how this intriguing interplay manifests in an interacting 2-species atomic mixture - one bosonic and another fermionic with two spin components - within a realistic trap configuration. We further show that such interplay of transitions can render the nature of the ground state to be highly sensitive to the experimental parameters and the dimensionality of the system.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures; Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Magnetic field configuration and field-aligned acceleration of energetic ions during substorm onsets

International audienceIn this paper, we present an interpretation of the observed field-aligned acceleration events measured by GEOS-2 near the night-side synchronous orbit at substorm onsets (Chen et al., 2000). We show that field-aligned acceleration of ions (with pitch angle asymmetry) is closely related to strong short-lived electric fields in the Ey direction. The acceleration is associated with either rapid dipolarization or further stretching of local magnetic field lines. Theoretical analysis suggests that a centrifugal mechanism is a likely candidate for the parallel energization. Equatorward or anti-equatorward energization occurs when the tail current sheet is thinner tailward or earthward of the spacecraft, respectively. The magnetic field topology leading to anti-equatorward energization corresponds to a situation where the near-Earth tail undergoes further compression and the inner edge of the plasma sheet extends inwards as close as the night-side geosynchronous altitudes

Modulational instability in a layered Kerr medium: Theory and Experiment

We present the first experimental investigation of modulational instability in a layered Kerr medium. The particularly interesting and appealing feature of our configuration, consisting of alternating glass-air layers, is the piecewise-constant nature of the material properties, which allows a theoretical linear stability analysis leading to a Kronig-Penney equation whose forbidden bands correspond to the modulationally unstable regimes. We find very good {\it quantitative} agreement between theoretical, numerical, and experimental diagnostics of the modulational instability. Because of the periodicity in the evolution variable arising from the layered medium, there are multiple instability regions rather than just one as in the uniform medium.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, contains experimental + computational + theoretical results, to appear in Physical Review Letter