46,526 research outputs found
A double main sequence turn-off in the rich star cluster NGC 1846 in the Large Magellanic Cloud
We report on HST/ACS photometry of the rich intermediate-age star cluster NGC
1846 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which clearly reveals the presence of a
double main sequence turn-off in this object. Despite this, the main sequence,
sub-giant branch, and red giant branch are all narrow and well-defined, and the
red clump is compact. We examine the spatial distribution of turn-off stars and
demonstrate that all belong to NGC 1846 rather than to any field star
population. In addition, the spatial distributions of the two sets of turn-off
stars may exhibit different central concentrations and some asymmetries. By
fitting isochrones, we show that the properties of the colour-magnitude diagram
can be explained if there are two stellar populations of equivalent metal
abundance in NGC 1846, differing in age by approximately 300 Myr. The absolute
ages of the two populations are ~1.9 and ~2.2 Gyr, although there may be a
systematic error of up to +/-0.4 Gyr in these values. The metal abundance
inferred from isochrone fitting is [M/H] ~ -0.40, consistent with spectroscopic
measurements of [Fe/H]. We propose that the observed properties of NGC 1846 can
be explained if this object originated via the tidal capture of two star
clusters formed separately in a star cluster group in a single giant molecular
cloud. This scenario accounts naturally for the age difference and uniform
metallicity of the two member populations, as well as the differences in their
spatial distributions.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS. A version with
full resolution figures may be obtained at
http://www.roe.ac.uk/~dmy/papers/MN-07-0441-MJ_rv.ps.gz (postscript) or at
http://www.roe.ac.uk/~dmy/papers/MN-07-0441-MJ_rv.pdf (PDF
Dressed Qubits
Inherent gate errors can arise in quantum computation when the actual system
Hamiltonian or Hilbert space deviates from the desired one. Two important
examples we address are spin-coupled quantum dots in the presence of spin-orbit
perturbations to the Heisenberg exchange interaction, and off-resonant
transitions of a qubit embedded in a multilevel Hilbert space. We propose a
``dressed qubit'' transformation for dealing with such inherent errors. Unlike
quantum error correction, the dressed qubits method does not require additional
operations or encoding redundancy, is insenstitive to error magnitude, and
imposes no new experimental constraints.Comment: Replaced with published versio
The trumping relation and the structure of the bipartite entangled states
The majorization relation has been shown to be useful in classifying which
transformations of jointly held quantum states are possible using local
operations and classical communication. In some cases, a direct transformation
between two states is not possible, but it becomes possible in the presence of
another state (known as a catalyst); this situation is described mathematically
by the trumping relation, an extension of majorization. The structure of the
trumping relation is not nearly as well understood as that of majorization. We
give an introduction to this subject and derive some new results. Most notably,
we show that the dimension of the required catalyst is in general unbounded;
there is no integer such that it suffices to consider catalysts of
dimension or less in determining which states can be catalyzed into a given
state. We also show that almost all bipartite entangled states are potentially
useful as catalysts.Comment: 7 pages, RevTe
Direct Characterization of Quantum Dynamics
The characterization of quantum dynamics is a fundamental and central task in
quantum mechanics. This task is typically addressed by quantum process
tomography (QPT). Here we present an alternative "direct characterization of
quantum dynamics" (DCQD) algorithm. In contrast to all known QPT methods, this
algorithm relies on error-detection techniques and does not require any quantum
state tomography. We illustrate that, by construction, the DCQD algorithm can
be applied to the task of obtaining partial information about quantum dynamics.
Furthermore, we argue that the DCQD algorithm is experimentally implementable
in a variety of prominent quantum information processing systems, and show how
it can be realized in photonic systems with present day technology.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, published versio
Novel schemes for measurement-based quantum computation
We establish a framework which allows one to construct novel schemes for
measurement-based quantum computation. The technique further develops tools
from many-body physics - based on finitely correlated or projected entangled
pair states - to go beyond the cluster-state based one-way computer. We
identify resource states that are radically different from the cluster state,
in that they exhibit non-vanishing correlation functions, can partly be
prepared using gates with non-maximal entangling power, or have very different
local entanglement properties. In the computational models, the randomness is
compensated in a different manner. It is shown that there exist resource states
which are locally arbitrarily close to a pure state. Finally, we comment on the
possibility of tailoring computational models to specific physical systems as,
e.g. cold atoms in optical lattices.Comment: 5 pages RevTeX, 1 figure, many diagrams. Title changed, presentation
improved, material adde
Products of Random Matrices
We derive analytic expressions for infinite products of random 2x2 matrices.
The determinant of the target matrix is log-normally distributed, whereas the
remainder is a surprisingly complicated function of a parameter characterizing
the norm of the matrix and a parameter characterizing its skewness. The
distribution may have importance as an uncommitted prior in statistical image
analysis.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur
Algebraic and information-theoretic conditions for operator quantum error-correction
Operator quantum error-correction is a technique for robustly storing quantum
information in the presence of noise. It generalizes the standard theory of
quantum error-correction, and provides a unified framework for topics such as
quantum error-correction, decoherence-free subspaces, and noiseless subsystems.
This paper develops (a) easily applied algebraic and information-theoretic
conditions which characterize when operator quantum error-correction is
feasible; (b) a representation theorem for a class of noise processes which can
be corrected using operator quantum error-correction; and (c) generalizations
of the coherent information and quantum data processing inequality to the
setting of operator quantum error-correction.Comment: 4 page
Monotonicity of quantum relative entropy revisited
Monotonicity under coarse-graining is a crucial property of the quantum
relative entropy. The aim of this paper is to investigate the condition of
equality in the monotonicity theorem and in its consequences such as the strong
sub-additivity of the von Neumann entropy, the Golden-Thompson trace inequality
and the monotonicity of the Holevo quantity.The relation to quantum Markovian
states is briefly indicated.Comment: 13 pages, LATEX fil
Optimality of programmable quantum measurements
We prove that for a programmable measurement device that approximates every
POVM with an error , the dimension of the program space has to grow
at least polynomially with . In the case of qubits we can
improve the general result by showing a linear growth. This proves the
optimality of the programmable measurement devices recently designed in [G. M.
D'Ariano and P. Perinotti, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{94}, 090401 (2005)]
Fault-tolerant quantum computation with cluster states
The one-way quantum computing model introduced by Raussendorf and Briegel
[Phys. Rev. Lett. 86 (22), 5188-5191 (2001)] shows that it is possible to
quantum compute using only a fixed entangled resource known as a cluster state,
and adaptive single-qubit measurements. This model is the basis for several
practical proposals for quantum computation, including a promising proposal for
optical quantum computation based on cluster states [M. A. Nielsen,
arXiv:quant-ph/0402005, accepted to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett.]. A significant
open question is whether such proposals are scalable in the presence of
physically realistic noise. In this paper we prove two threshold theorems which
show that scalable fault-tolerant quantum computation may be achieved in
implementations based on cluster states, provided the noise in the
implementations is below some constant threshold value. Our first threshold
theorem applies to a class of implementations in which entangling gates are
applied deterministically, but with a small amount of noise. We expect this
threshold to be applicable in a wide variety of physical systems. Our second
threshold theorem is specifically adapted to proposals such as the optical
cluster-state proposal, in which non-deterministic entangling gates are used. A
critical technical component of our proofs is two powerful theorems which
relate the properties of noisy unitary operations restricted to act on a
subspace of state space to extensions of those operations acting on the entire
state space.Comment: 31 pages, 54 figure
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