Entanglement Swapping: Entangling Atoms That Never Interacted

In this paper we discuss four different proposals of entangling atomic states of particles which have never interacted. The experimental realization proposed makes use of the interaction of Rydberg atoms with a micromaser cavity prepared in either a coherent state or in a superposition of the zero and one field Fock states. We consider atoms in either a three-level cascade or lambda configurationComment: 17 pages and 2 figure

Uniform semiclassical approximation in quantum statistical mechanics

We present a simple method to deal with caustics in the semiclassical approximation to the partition function of a one-dimensional quantum system. The procedure, which makes use of complex trajectories, is applied to the quartic double-well potential.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, Latex. Contribution to the Proceedings of the XXI Brazilian National Meeting on Particles and Fields (Sao Lourenco, October 23-27, 2000

The Role of Fermions in Bubble Nucleation

We present a study of the role of fermions in the decay of metastable states of a scalar field via bubble nucleation. We analyze both one and three-dimensional systems by using a gradient expansion for the calculation of the fermionic determinant. The results of the one-dimensional case are compared to the exact results of previous work.Comment: 15 pages, revtex, 9 figure

Tetraquark Production in Double Parton Scattering

We develop a model to study tetraquark production in hadronic collisions. We focus on double parton scattering and formulate a version of the color evaporation model for the production of the $X(3872)$ and of the $T_{4c}$ tetraquark, a state composed by the $c \bar{c} c \bar{c}$ quarks. We find that the production cross section grows rapidly with the collision energy $\sqrt{s}$ and make predictions for the forthcoming higher energy data of the LHC.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures. Corrections in the text and reference