1,247 research outputs found
ELECTIONS: Elections and Primaries Through the Pandemic
The 2020 election cycle was all but normal. Due to certain health concerns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, Georgia delayed its primary election three months from March to June and summarily mailed absentee ballot request forms to all active, registered voters. From presidential social media postings to a federal lawsuit, debate ensued over the widespread usage of absentee ballots, their overall effectiveness and security, who would receive request forms, and whether postage requirements qualified as an impermissible poll tax. To further compound these uncertainties, Georgia legislators, who are not permitted to fundraise or campaign during the forty-day legislative session, had to make significant changes to their election campaign strategies to account for the suspended term. This Peach Sheet explores Georgiaâs 2020 election season and outlines the major issues that faced the state through the ongoing pandemic
Detecting unambiguously non-Abelian geometric phases with trapped ions
We propose for the first time an experimentally feasible scheme to disclose
the noncommutative effects induced by a light-induced non-Abelian gauge
structure with trapped ions. Under an appropriate configuration, a true
non-Abelian gauge potential naturally arises in connection with the geometric
phase associated with two degenerated dark states in a four-state atomic system
interacting with three pulsed laser fields. We show that the population in
atomic state at the end of a composed path formed by two closed loops and
in the parameter space can be significantly different from the composed
counter-ordered path. This population difference is directly induced by the
noncommutative feature of non-Abelian geometric phases and can be detected
unambiguously with current technology.Comment: 6 page
Implementation of Grover's Quantum Search Algorithm in a Scalable System
We report the implementation of Grover's quantum search algorithm in the
scalable system of trapped atomic ion quantum bits. Any one of four possible
states of a two-qubit memory is marked, and following a single query of the
search space, the marked element is successfully recovered with an average
probability of 60(2)%. This exceeds the performance of any possible classical
search algorithm, which can only succeed with a maximum average probability of
50%.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, updated error discussio
The bloodstream differentiation - division of Trypanosoma brucei studied using mitochondrial markers
In the bloodstream of its mammalian host, the African trypanosome Trypanosoma brucei undergoes a life cycle stage differentiation from a long, slender form to a short, stumpy form. This involves three known major events: exit from a proliferative cell cycle, morphological change and mitochondrial biogenesis. Previously, models have been proposed accounting for these events (Matthews & Gull 1994a). Refinement of, and discrimination between, these models has been hindered by a lack of stage-regulated antigens useful as markers at the single-cell level. We have now evaluated a variety of cytological markers and applied them to investigate the coordination of phenotypic differentiation and cell cycle arrest. Our studies have focused on the differential expression of the mitochondrial enzyme dihydrolipoamide dehydrogenase relative to the differentiation-division of bloodstream trypanosomes. The results implicate a temporal order of events: commitment, division, phenotypic differentiation
Phase Control of Trapped Ion Quantum Gates
There are several known schemes for entangling trapped ion quantum bits for
large-scale quantum computation. Most are based on an interaction between the
ions and external optical fields, coupling internal qubit states of
trapped-ions to their Coulomb-coupled motion. In this paper, we examine the
sensitivity of these motional gate schemes to phase fluctuations introduced
through noisy external control fields, and suggest techniques to suppress the
resulting phase decoherence.Comment: 21 pages 12 figure
Entanglement of Trapped-Ion Clock States
A M{\o}lmer-S{\o}rensen entangling gate is realized for pairs of trapped
Cd ions using magnetic-field insensitive "clock" states and an
implementation offering reduced sensitivity to optical phase drifts. The gate
is used to generate the complete set of four entangled states, which are
reconstructed and evaluated with quantum-state tomography. An average
target-state fidelity of 0.79 is achieved, limited by available laser power and
technical noise. The tomographic reconstruction of entangled states
demonstrates universal quantum control of two ion-qubits, which through
multiplexing can provide a route to scalable architectures for trapped-ion
quantum computing.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
Magneto-optical Trapping of Cadmium
We report the laser-cooling and confinement of Cd atoms in a magneto-optical
trap, and characterize the loading process from the background Cd vapor. The
trapping laser drives the 1S0-1P1 transition at 229 nm in this two-electron
atom and also photoionizes atoms directly from the 1P1 state. This
photoionization overwhelms the other loss mechanisms and allows a direct
measurement of the photoionization cross section, which we measure to be
2(1)x10^(-16)cm^(2) from the 1P1 state. When combined with nearby laser-cooled
and trapped Cd^(+) ions, this apparatus could facilitate studies in ultracold
interactions between atoms and ions.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figure
Relativity, rank and the utility of income
This is the accepted version of the following article: Rablen, M. D. (2008), Relativity, Rank and the Utility of Income. The Economic Journal, 118: 801â821, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2008.02143.x/abstract.Relative utility has become an important concept in several disjoint areas of economics. I present a cardinal model of income utility based on the supposition that agents care about their rank in the income distribution and that utility is subject to adaptation over time. Utility levels correspond to the Leyden Individual Welfare Function while utility differences yield a version of the prospect theory value function, thereby providing a new and shared derivation of each. I offer an explanation of some long-standing paradoxes in the wellbeing literature and an insight into the links between relative comparisons and loss aversion.ESR
Precautionary Regulation in Europe and the United States: A Quantitative Comparison
Much attention has been addressed to the question of whether Europe or the United States adopts a more precautionary stance to the regulation of potential environmental, health, and safety risks. Some commentators suggest that Europe is more risk-averse and precautionary, whereas the US is seen as more risk-taking and optimistic about the prospects for new technology. Others suggest that the US is more precautionary because its regulatory process is more legalistic and adversarial, while Europe is more lax and corporatist in its regulations. The flip-flop hypothesis claims that the US was more precautionary than Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s, and that Europe has become more precautionary since then. We examine the levels and trends in regulation of environmental, health, and safety risks since 1970. Unlike previous research, which has studied only a small set of prominent cases selected non-randomly, we develop a comprehensive list of almost 3,000 risks and code the relative stringency of regulation in Europe and the US for each of 100 risks randomly selected from that list for each year from 1970 through 2004. Our results suggest that: (a) averaging over risks, there is no significant difference in relative precaution over the period, (b) weakly consistent with the flip-flop hypothesis, there is some evidence of a modest shift toward greater relative precaution of European regulation since about 1990, although (c) there is a diversity of trends across risks, of which the most common is no change in relative precaution (including cases where Europe and the US are equally precautionary and where Europe or the US has been consistently more precautionary). The overall finding is of a mixed and diverse pattern of relative transatlantic precaution over the period
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