A survey of selected coastal vegetation communities of Florida

A survey of coastal vegetation around Florida was conducted during 1973 and 1974. Seventeen sites were selected and sampled using the transect method to determine species occurrence, relative densities, and habitat development and structure. Sites were sampled quarterly except where high tides prevented data gathering. Species occurrence was compared within and between sites using Sarensen's Index of Similarity (IS,) as a basis for determining similarity of species inhabiting selected sites. Indices ranged from 4 to 61%, the former representing only one plant common to two sites. Results show environmental factors acting upon species alter species composition in seemingly similar habitats. Instead of the term "community", the term "association" is used to better reflect the concept of a taxonomically unrelated group of plants occupying a particular habitat. (Document has 40 pages.

Squeezing more out of a laser

A laser's intensity can be stabilized by negative feedback from a conventional photodetector. I propose extraction of sub-shot-noise light from the feedback loop at a beam splitter by illuminating the back side of the beam splitter with squeezed-state light

Predicting Future Duration from Present Age: A Critical Assessment

Using a temporal version of the Copernican principle, Gott has proposed a statistical predictor of future longevity based on present age [J. R. Gott III, Nature 363, 315 (1993)] and applied the predictor to a variety of examples, including the longevity of the human species. Though Gott's proposal contains a grain of truth, it does not have the universal predictive power that he attributes to it.Comment: 17 pages, standard LaTeX; to be published in Contemporary Physic

Particle-Number-Conserving Bogoliubov Approximation for Bose-Einstein Condensates Using Extended Catalytic States

We encode the many-body wavefunction of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the $N$-particle sector of an extended catalytic state. This catalytic state is a coherent state for the condensate mode and an arbitrary state for the modes orthogonal to the condensate mode. Going to a time-dependent interaction picture where the state of the condensate mode is displaced to the vacuum, we can organize the effective Hamiltonian by powers of ${N}^{-1/2}$. Requiring the terms of order ${N}^{1/2}$ to vanish gives the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Going to the next order, $N^0$, we derive equations for the number-conserving Bogoliubov approximation, first given by Castin and Dum [Phys. Rev. A $\textbf{57}$, 3008 (1998)]. In contrast to other approaches, ours is well suited to calculating the state evolution in the Schr\"{o}dinger picture; moreover, it is straightforward to generalize our method to multi-component BECs and to higher-order corrections.Comment: 29 pages, 1 figur

Entangling power of the quantum baker's map

We investigate entanglement production in a class of quantum baker's maps. The dynamics of these maps is constructed using strings of qubits, providing a natural tensor-product structure for application of various entanglement measures. We find that, in general, the quantum baker's maps are good at generating entanglement, producing multipartite entanglement amongst the qubits close to that expected in random states. We investigate the evolution of several entanglement measures: the subsystem linear entropy, the concurrence to characterize entanglement between pairs of qubits, and two proposals for a measure of multipartite entanglement. Also derived are some new analytical formulae describing the levels of entanglement expected in random pure states.Comment: 22 pages, 11 figure

Quantum wideband traveling-wave analysis of a degenerate parametric amplifier

We develop a wideband traveling-wave formalism for analyzing quantum mechanically a degenerate parametric amplifier. The formalism is based on spatial differential equations-spatial Langevin equations-that propagate temporal Fourier components of the field operators through the nonlinear medium. In addition to the parametric nonlinearity, the Langevin equations include absorption and associated fluctuations, dispersion (phase mismatching), and pump quantum fluctuations. We analyze the dominant effects of phase mismatching and pump quantum fluctuations on the squeezing produced by a degenerate parametric amplifier