Partial Trajectory: The Story of the Altered Nuclear Transfer-Oocyte Assisted Reprogramming (ANT-OAR) Proposal

This essay aims to tell the story of the “altered nuclear transfer-oocyte assisted reprogramming,” or ANT-OAR, proposal—from its conception by Professor William Hurlbut of the President’s Council on Bioethics—to its adoption and promotion by a group of conservative, mostly Catholic philosophers, theologians and scientists—to its eventual demise in Congress. It also will give some reflections on how ANT-OAR promotes a genetically deterministic view of the human organism and can lead down a slippery slope into a future in which human cloning and human genetic engineering are more acceptable. For these reasons, it will be argued, ANT-OAR should be opposed by all who are against human genetic modification regardless of their political orientation

Editorial Introduction: The utility and futility of 'the nation' in histories of Aotearoa New Zealand.

An introduction is presented which discusses articles in the issue on New Zealand history, including one on interracial rape and sexual violence in the 1860s, one on postcolonial methodology and the historical concept of the British World, and one on Whanganui Māori claims to the Whanganui River

Suppression of ac Stark shift scattering rate due to non-Markovian behavior

The ac Stark shift in the presence of spontaneous decay is typically considered to induce an effective dephasing with a scattering rate equal to $\Gamma_s |\Omega|^2/\Delta^2$, where $\Gamma_s$ is the spontaneous decay rate, $\Omega$ is the laser transition coupling, and $\Delta$ is the detuning. We show that under realistic circumstances this dephasing rate may be strongly modifed due to non-Markovian behavior. The non-Markovian behavior arises due to an effective modification of the light-atom coupling in the presence of the ac Stark shift laser. An analytical formula for the non-Markovian ac Stark shift induced dephasing is derived. We obtain that for narrow laser linewidths the effective dephasing rate is suppressed by a factor of $Q^2$, where $Q$ is the quality factor of the laser.Comment: Accepted in PRA Rapid Communication

Entanglement generation in quantum networks of Bose-Einstein condensates

Two component (spinor) Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are considered as the nodes of an interconnected quantum network. Unlike standard single-system qubits, in a BEC the quantum information is duplicated in a large number of identical bosonic particles, thus can be considered to be a "macroscopic" qubit. One of the difficulties with such a system is how to effectively interact such qubits together in order to transfer quantum information and create entanglement. Here we propose a scheme of cavities containing spinor BECs coupled by optical fiber in order to achieve this task. We discuss entanglement generation and quantum state transfer between nodes using such macroscopic BEC qubits.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

Long-short wavelength mode coupling tightens primordial black hole constraints

The effects of non-Gaussianity on the constraints on the primordial curvature perturbation power spectrum from primordial black holes (PBHs) are considered. We extend previous analyses to include the effects of coupling between the modes of the horizon scale at the time the PBH forms and superhorizon modes. We consider terms of up to third order in the Gaussian perturbation. For the weakest constraints on the abundance of PBHs in the early universe (corresponding to a fractional energy density of PBHs of 10−5 at the time of formation), in the case of Gaussian perturbations, constraints on the power spectrum are Pζ<0.05 but can be significantly tighter when even a small amount of non-Gaussianity is considered, to Pζ<0.01, and become approximately Pζ<0.003 in more special cases. Surprisingly, even when there is negative skew (which naively would suggest fewer areas of high density, leading to weaker constraints), we find that the constraints on the power spectrum become tighter than the purely Gaussian case—in strong contrast with previous results. We find that the constraints are highly sensitive to both the non-Gaussianity parameters as well as the amplitude of superhorizon perturbations