Disentanglement of two harmonic oscillators in relativistic motion

We study the dynamics of quantum entanglement between two Unruh-DeWitt detectors, one stationary (Alice), and another uniformly accelerating (Rob), with no direct interaction but coupled to a common quantum field in (3+1)D Minkowski space. We find that for all cases studied the initial entanglement between the detectors disappears in a finite time ("sudden death"). After the moment of total disentanglement the correlations between the two detectors remain nonzero until late times. The relation between the disentanglement time and Rob's proper acceleration is observer dependent. The larger the acceleration is, the longer the disentanglement time in Alice's coordinate, but the shorter in Rob's coordinate.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures; typos added, minor changes in Secs. I and

Design of Scalable Continuous Media Servers with Dynamic Replication

Multimedia applications place high demands for quality-of-service (QoS), performance, and reliability on systems. These stringent requirements make design of cost-effective and scalable systems difficult. Therefore efficient adaptive and dynamic resource management techniques in conjunction with data placement techniques can be of great help in improving performance, scalability and reliability of such systems. In this paper, we first focus on data placement. In the recent past, a great deal of work has focused on "wide" data striping as a way of dealing with load imbalance problems caused by skews in data access patterns. Another approach to dealing with load imbalance problems is replication. The appropriate compromise between the degree of striping and the degree of replication is key to the design of scalable continuous media (CM) servers. In this work we focus on evaluation of this compromise in the context of a hybrid CM server design. Changes in data access patterns lead to other questions: (1) when should the system alter the number of copies of a CM object, and (2) how to accomplish this change. We address (1) through an adaptive threshold-based approach, and we use dynamic replication policies in conjunction with a mathematical model of user behavior to address (2). We do this without any knowledge of data access patterns and with provisions for full use of VCR functionality. Through a performance study, we show that not only does the use of this mathematical model in conjunction with dynamic resource management policies improves the system's performance but that it also facilitates reduced sensitivity to changes in:(a) workload characteristics, (b) skewness of data access patterns, and (c) frequency of changes in data access patterns. We believe that not only is this a desirable property for a CM server, in general, but that furthermore, it suggests the usefulness of these techniques across a wide range of continuous media applications. (Cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2001-21

A simple variational approach to the quantum Frenkel-Kontorova model

We present a simple and complete variational approach to the one-dimensional quantum Frenkel-Kontorova model. Dirac's time-dependent variational principle is adopted together with a Hatree-type many-body trial wavefunction for the atoms. The single-particle state is assumed to have the Jackiw-Kerman form. We obtain an effective classical Hamiltonian for the system which is simple enough for a complete numerical solution for the static ground state of the model. Numerical results show that our simple approach captures the essence of the quantum effects first observed in quantum Monte Carlo studies.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Inelastic diffraction and color-singlet gluon-clusters in high-energy hadron-hadron and lepton-hadron collisions

It is proposed, that ``the colorless objects'' which manifest themselves in large-rapidity-gap events are color-singlet gluon-clusters due to self-organized criticality (SOC), and that optical-geometrical concepts and methods are useful in examing the space-time properties of such objects. A simple analytical expression for the $t$-dependence of the inelastic single diffractive cross section $d\sigma/dt$ ($t$ is the four-momentum transfer squared) is derived. Comparison with the existing data and predictions for future experiments are presented. The main differences and similarities between the SOC-approach and the ``Partons in the Pomeron (Pomeron and Reggeon)''-approach are discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Remote Data Retrieval for Bioinformatics Applications: An Agent Migration Approach

Some of the approaches have been developed to retrieve data automatically from one or multiple remote biological data sources. However, most of them require researchers to remain online and wait for returned results. The latter not only requires highly available network connection, but also may cause the network overload. Moreover, so far none of the existing approaches has been designed to address the following problems when retrieving the remote data in a mobile network environment: (1) the resources of mobile devices are limited; (2) network connection is relatively of low quality; and (3) mobile users are not always online. To address the aforementioned problems, we integrate an agent migration approach with a multi-agent system to overcome the high latency or limited bandwidth problem by moving their computations to the required resources or services. More importantly, the approach is fit for the mobile computing environments. Presented in this paper are also the system architecture, the migration strategy, as well as the security authentication of agent migration. As a demonstration, the remote data retrieval from GenBank was used to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach

Election turnout statistics in many countries: similarities, differences, and a diffusive field model for decision-making

We study in details the turnout rate statistics for 77 elections in 11 different countries. We show that the empirical results established in a previous paper for French elections appear to hold much more generally. We find in particular that the spatial correlation of turnout rates decay logarithmically with distance in all cases. This result is quantitatively reproduced by a decision model that assumes that each voter makes his mind as a result of three influence terms: one totally idiosyncratic component, one city-specific term with short-ranged fluctuations in space, and one long-ranged correlated field which propagates diffusively in space. A detailed analysis reveals several interesting features: for example, different countries have different degrees of local heterogeneities and seem to be characterized by a different propensity for individuals to conform to the cultural norm. We furthermore find clear signs of herding (i.e. strongly correlated decisions at the individual level) in some countries, but not in others.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, 7 table

Quantitative test of the barrier nucleosome model for statistical positioning of nucleosomes up- and downstream of transcription start sites

The positions of nucleosomes in eukaryotic genomes determine which parts of the DNA sequence are readily accessible for regulatory proteins and which are not. Genome-wide maps of nucleosome positions have revealed a salient pattern around transcription start sites, involving a nucleosome-free region (NFR) flanked by a pronounced periodic pattern in the average nucleosome density. While the periodic pattern clearly reflects well-positioned nucleosomes, the positioning mechanism is less clear. A recent experimental study by Mavrich et al. argued that the pattern observed in S. cerevisiae is qualitatively consistent with a `barrier nucleosome model', in which the oscillatory pattern is created by the statistical positioning mechanism of Kornberg and Stryer. On the other hand, there is clear evidence for intrinsic sequence preferences of nucleosomes, and it is unclear to what extent these sequence preferences affect the observed pattern. To test the barrier nucleosome model, we quantitatively analyze yeast nucleosome positioning data both up- and downstream from NFRs. Our analysis is based on the Tonks model of statistical physics which quantifies the interplay between the excluded-volume interaction of nucleosomes and their positional entropy. We find that although the typical patterns on the two sides of the NFR are different, they are both quantitatively described by the same physical model, with the same parameters, but different boundary conditions. The inferred boundary conditions suggest that the first nucleosome downstream from the NFR (the +1 nucleosome) is typically directly positioned while the first nucleosome upstream is statistically positioned via a nucleosome-repelling DNA region. These boundary conditions, which can be locally encoded into the genome sequence, significantly shape the statistical distribution of nucleosomes over a range of up to ~1000 bp to each side.Comment: includes supporting materia