Inflation from Tsunami-waves

We investigate inflation driven by the evolution of highly excited quantum states within the framework of out of equilibrium field dynamics. These states are characterized by a non-perturbatively large number of quanta in a band of momenta but with vanishing expectation value of the scalar field.They represent the situation in which initially a non-perturbatively large energy density is localized in a band of high energy quantum modes and are coined tsunami-waves. The self-consistent evolution of this quantum state and the scale factor is studied analytically and numerically. It is shown that the time evolution of these quantum states lead to two consecutive stages of inflation under conditions that are the quantum analogue of slow-roll. The evolution of the scale factor during the first stage has new features that are characteristic of the quantum state. During this initial stage the quantum fluctuations in the highly excited band build up an effective homogeneous condensate with a non- perturbatively large amplitude as a consequence of the large number of quanta. The second stage of inflation is similar to the usual classical chaotic scenario but driven by this effective condensate.The excited quantum modes are already superhorizon in the first stage and do not affect the power spectrum of scalar perturbations. Thus, this tsunami quantum state provides a field theoretical justification for chaotic scenarios driven by a classical homogeneous scalar field of large amplitude.Comment: LaTex, 36 pages, 7 .ps figures. Improved version to appear in Nucl. Phys.

Profiles of thermal line emission from advection dominated accretion flows

Recently, Narayan & Raymond (1999) proposed that the thermal emission lines from the hot plasma in advection dominated accretion flows (ADAFs) are potentially observable with the next generation of X-ray observatories, with which the physical properties of some X-ray sources can be probed. In ADAFs, the temperature of the ion is so high that the thermal broadening of the line is important. We calculate the profiles of thermal line emission from ADAFs, in which both the thermal and Doppler broadening have been considered. It is found that the double-peaked profiles are present for high inclination angles between the axis of disk and the line of sight. The double-peaked profiles are smeared in low inclination cases, and completely disappear while the inclination angle is less than $15^{\circ}$, where the thermal and turbulent broadening dominated on the line profiles. We also note that the thermal line profile is affected by the location of the transition radius of ADAF. The self-similar height-integrated disk structure and the emissivity with power-law dependence of radius are adopted in our calculations. The results obtained in this work can be used as a diagnosis on the future X-ray observations of the thermal lines. Some important physical quantities of ADAFs could be inferred from future thermal line observations.Comment: 7 page

Polarization correlated photons from a positively charged quantum dot

Polarized cross-correlation spectroscopy on a quantum dot charged with a single hole shows the sequential emission of photons with common circular polarization. This effect is visible without magnetic field, but becomes more pronounced as the field along the quantization axis is increased. We interpret the data in terms of electron dephasing in the X+ state caused by the Overhauser field of nuclei in the dot. We predict the correlation timescale can be increased by accelerating the emission rate with cavity-QED

When Both Transmitting and Receiving Energies Matter: An Application of Network Coding in Wireless Body Area Networks

A network coding scheme for practical implementations of wireless body area networks is presented, with the objective of providing reliability under low-energy constraints. We propose a simple network layer protocol for star networks, adapting redundancy based on both transmission and reception energies for data and control packets, as well as channel conditions. Our numerical results show that even for small networks, the amount of energy reduction achievable can range from 29% to 87%, as the receiving energy per control packet increases from equal to much larger than the transmitting energy per data packet. The achievable gains increase as a) more nodes are added to the network, and/or b) the channels seen by different sensor nodes become more asymmetric.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, submitted to the NC-Pro Workshop at IFIP Networking Conference 2011, and to appear in the conference proceedings, published by Springer-Verlag, in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) serie

Quantitative magnetic resonance image analysis via the EM algorithm with stochastic variation

Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (qMRI) provides researchers insight into pathological and physiological alterations of living tissue, with the help of which researchers hope to predict (local) therapeutic efficacy early and determine optimal treatment schedule. However, the analysis of qMRI has been limited to ad-hoc heuristic methods. Our research provides a powerful statistical framework for image analysis and sheds light on future localized adaptive treatment regimes tailored to the individual's response. We assume in an imperfect world we only observe a blurred and noisy version of the underlying pathological/physiological changes via qMRI, due to measurement errors or unpredictable influences. We use a hidden Markov random field to model the spatial dependence in the data and develop a maximum likelihood approach via the Expectation--Maximization algorithm with stochastic variation. An important improvement over previous work is the assessment of variability in parameter estimation, which is the valid basis for statistical inference. More importantly, we focus on the expected changes rather than image segmentation. Our research has shown that the approach is powerful in both simulation studies and on a real dataset, while quite robust in the presence of some model assumption violations.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOAS157 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Competing Ground States in Triple-layered Sr4Ru3O10: Verging on Itinerant Ferromagnetism with Critical Fluctuations

Sr4Ru3O10 is characterized by a sharp metamagnetic transition and ferromagnetic behavior occurring within the basal plane and along the c-axis, respectively. Resistivity at magnetic field, B, exhibits low-frequency quantum oscillations when B||c-axis and large magnetoresistivity accompanied by critical fluctuations driven by the metamagnetism when B^c-axis. The complex behavior evidenced in resistivity, magnetization and specific heat presented is not characteristic of any obvious ground states, and points to an exotic state that shows a delicate balance between fluctuations and order.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure