Integration of the VIMOS control system

The VIRMOS consortium of French and Italian Institutes (PI: O. Le Fevre, co-PI: G. Vettolani) is manufacturing two wide field imaging multi-object spectrographs for the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope (VLT), with emphasis on the ability to carry over spectroscopic surveys of large numbers of sources: the VIsible Multi-Object Spectrograph, VIMOS, and the Near InfraRed Multi-Object Spectrograph, NIRMOS. There are 52 motors to be controlled in parallel in the spectrograph, making VIMOS a complex machine to be handled. This paper will focus on the description of the control system, designed in the ESO VLT standard control concepts, and on some integration issues and problem solving strategies.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, ICALEPCS 2001 Conference, PSN#TUBT00

Engineering an interaction and entanglement between distant atoms

We propose a scheme to generate an effective interaction of arbitrary strength between the internal degrees of freedom of two atoms placed in distant cavities connected by an optical fiber. The strength depends on the field intensity in the cavities. As an application of this interaction, we calculate the amount of entanglement it generates between the internal states of the distant atoms. The scheme effectively converts entanglement distribution networks to networks of interacting spins.Comment: published versio

Incommensurate magnetism in cuprate materials

In the low doping region an incommensurate magnetic phase is observed in LSCO. By means of the composite operator method we show that the single-band 2D Hubbard model describes the experimental situation. In the higher doping region, where experiments are not available, the incommensurability is depressed owing to the van Hove singularity near the Fermi level. A proportionality between the incommensurability amplitude and the critical temperature is predicted, suggesting a close relation between superconductivity and incommensurate magnetism.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures in one Postscript file, RevTe

Information geometric complexity of a trivariate Gaussian statistical model

We evaluate the information geometric complexity of entropic motion on low-dimensional Gaussian statistical manifolds in order to quantify how difficult is making macroscopic predictions about a systems in the presence of limited information. Specifically, we observe that the complexity of such entropic inferences not only depends on the amount of available pieces of information but also on the manner in which such pieces are correlated. Finally, we uncover that for certain correlational structures, the impossibility of reaching the most favorable configuration from an entropic inference viewpoint, seems to lead to an information geometric analog of the well-known frustration effect that occurs in statistical physics.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur

Supplanting crystallography or supplementing microscopy? A combined approach to the study of an enveloped virus

The recent advances in the resolution obtained by single-particle reconstructions from cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) have led to an increase in studies that combine X-ray crystallographic results with those of electron microscopy (EM). Here, such a combination is described in the determination of the structure of an enveloped animal virus, Semliki Forest virus, at 9 Å resolution. The issues of model bias in determination of the structure, the definition of resolution in a single-particle reconstruction, the effect of the correction of the contrast-transfer function on the structure determined and the use of a high-resolution structure of a subunit in the interpretation of the structure of the complex are addressed