Quantum electrodynamics of a free particle near dispersive dielectric or conducting boundaries

Quantum electrodynamics near a boundary is investigated by considering the inertial mass shift of an electron near a dielectric or conducting surface. We show that in all tractable cases the shift can be written in terms of integrals over the TE and TM reflection coefficients associated with the surface, in analogy to the Lifshitz formula for the Casimir effect. We discuss the applications and potential limitations of this formula, and provide exact results for several models of the surface

An improved bound on distillable entanglement

The best bound known on 2-locally distillable entanglement is that of Vedral and Plenio, involving a certain measure of entanglement based on relative entropy. It turns out that a related argument can be used to give an even stronger bound; we give this bound, and examine some of its properties. In particular, and in contrast to the earlier bounds, the new bound is not additive in general. We give an example of a state for which the bound fails to be additive, as well as a number of states for which the bound is additive.Comment: 14 pages, no figures. A significant erratum in theorems 4 and 5 has been fixe

Irreversibility in asymptotic manipulations of entanglement

We show that the process of entanglement distillation is irreversible by showing that the entanglement cost of a bound entangled state is finite. Such irreversibility remains even if extra pure entanglement is loaned to assist the distillation process.Comment: RevTex, 3 pages, no figures Result on indistillability of PPT states under pure entanglement catalytic LOCC adde

Structural Optimization in automotive design

Although mathematical structural optimization has been an active research area for twenty years, there has been relatively little penetration into the design process. Experience indicates that often this is due to the traditional layout-analysis design process. In many cases, optimization efforts have been outgrowths of analysis groups which are themselves appendages to the traditional design process. As a result, optimization is often introduced into the design process too late to have a significant effect because many potential design variables have already been fixed. A series of examples are given to indicate how structural optimization has been effectively integrated into the design process

The walking robot project

A walking robot was designed, analyzed, and tested as an intelligent, mobile, and a terrain adaptive system. The robot's design was an application of existing technologies. The design of the six legs modified and combines well understood mechanisms and was optimized for performance, flexibility, and simplicity. The body design incorporated two tripods for walking stability and ease of turning. The electrical hardware design used modularity and distributed processing to drive the motors. The software design used feedback to coordinate the system and simple keystrokes to give commands. The walking machine can be easily adapted to hostile environments such as high radiation zones and alien terrain. The primary goal of the leg design was to create a leg capable of supporting a robot's body and electrical hardware while walking or performing desired tasks, namely those required for planetary exploration. The leg designers intent was to study the maximum amount of flexibility and maneuverability achievable by the simplest and lightest leg design. The main constraints for the leg design were leg kinematics, ease of assembly, degrees of freedom, number of motors, overall size, and weight

Anomalous magnetic moment of an electron near a dispersive surface

Changes in the magnetic moment of an electron near a dielectric or conducting surface due to boundary-dependent radiative corrections are investigated. The electromagnetic field is quantized by normal mode expansion for a nondispersive dielectric and an undamped plasma, but the electron is described by the Dirac equation without matter-field quantization. Perturbation theory in the Dirac equation leads to a general formula for the magnetic-moment shift in terms of integrals over products of electromagnetic mode functions. In each of the models investigated, contour integration techniques over a complex wave vector can be used to derive a general formula featuring just integrals over transverse electric and transverse magnetic reflection coefficients of the surface. Analysis of the magnetic-moment shift for several classes of materials yields markedly different results from the previously considered simplistic “perfect-reflector” model, due to the inclusion of physically important features of the electromagnetic response of the surface such as evanescent field modes and dispersion in the material. For a general dispersive dielectric surface, the magnetic-moment shift of a nearby electron can exceed the previous prediction of the perfect-reflector model by several orders of magnitude

On the origin of noisy states whose teleportation fidelity can be enhanced through dissipation

Recently Badziag \emph{et al.} \cite{badziag} obtained a class of noisy states whose teleportation fidelity can be enhanced by subjecting one of the qubits to dissipative interaction with the environment via amplitude damping channel (ADC). We show that such noisy states result while sharing the states (| \Phi ^{\pm}> =\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}(| 00> \pm | 11>)) across ADC. We also show that under similar dissipative interactions different Bell states give rise to noisy entangled states that are qualitatively very different from each other in the sense, only the noisy entangled states constructed from the Bell states (| \Phi ^{\pm}>) can \emph{}be made better sometimes by subjecting the unaffected qubit to a dissipative interaction with the environment. Importantly if the noisy state is non teleporting then it can always be made teleporting with this prescription. We derive the most general restrictions on improvement of such noisy states assuming that the damping parameters being different for both the qubits. However this curious prescription does not work for the noisy entangled states generated from (| \Psi ^{\pm}> =\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}(| 01> \pm | 10>)). This shows that an apriori knowledge of the noisy channel might be helpful to decide which Bell state needs to be shared between Alice and Bob. \emph{}Comment: Latex, 18 pages: Revised version with a new result. Submitted to PR

Teleportation and Secret Sharing with Pure Entangled States

We present two optimal methods of teleporting an unknown qubit using any pure entangled state. We also discuss how such methods can also have succesful application in quantum secret sharing with pure multipartite entangled states.Comment: Latex, 13 pages, submitted to PRA. One sub section already appeared in the archive: quant-ph /990701

Quantum key distribution with 2-bit quantum codes

We propose a prepare-and-measure scheme for quantum key distribution with 2-bit quantum codes. The protocol is unconditionally secure under whatever type of intercept-and-resend attack. Given the symmetric and independent errors to the transmitted qubits, our scheme can tolerate a bit error rate up to 26% in 4-state protocol and 30% in 6-state protocol, respectively. These values are higher than all currently known threshold values for prepare-and-measure protocols. A specific realization with linear optics is given.Comment: Approved for publication in Physical Review Letter

Mixedness and teleportation

We show that on exceeding a certain degree of mixedness (as quantified by the von Neumann entropy), entangled states become useless for teleporatation. By increasing the dimension of the entangled systems, this entropy threshold can be made arbitrarily close to maximal. This entropy is found to exceed the entropy threshold sufficient to ensure the failure of dense coding.Comment: 6 pages, no figure