The success of luxury brands in Japan and their uncertain future

The Japanese are the world?s largest individual consumers of luxury brands and form the second largest market for luxury goods after the US. The Japanese were the driving force behind the exponential growth of the European luxury industry and the resulting ?democratization of luxury?. This concept of giving everyone access to luxury branded goods is a paradox because it abandons the exclusivity that was the original basis of the European luxury industry in the hands of skilled designers and craftsmen. By making luxury branded goods widely accessible to most consumers they run a major risk of becoming simply too ?common?. The 2007-8 economic crisis adversely affected the luxury market, producing a general backlash against ?conspicuous consumption?. In Japan, as in most countries in the world, the crisis reduced consumers? discretionary spending, but in addition it also accelerated the fundamental shift in the attitude and behavior of Japanese luxury consumers.Japanese consumers of luxury brands, Japan the largest luxury market in the world, conspicuous consumption, democratization of luxury, luxury brands as status symbols, luxury brands as badges of economic success, parasite singles

Quantum sensing with arbitrary frequency resolution

Quantum sensing takes advantage of well controlled quantum systems for performing measurements with high sensitivity and precision. We have implemented a concept for quantum sensing with arbitrary frequency resolution, independent of the qubit probe and limited only by the stability of an external synchronization clock. Our concept makes use of quantum lock-in detection to continuously probe a signal of interest. Using the electronic spin of a single nitrogen vacancy center in diamond, we demonstrate detection of oscillating magnetic fields with a frequency resolution of 70 uHz over a MHz bandwidth. The continuous sampling further guarantees an excellent sensitivity, reaching a signal-to-noise ratio in excess of 10,000:1 for a 170 nT test signal measured during a one-hour interval. Our technique has applications in magnetic resonance spectroscopy, quantum simulation, and sensitive signal detection.Comment: Manuscript resubmitted to Science. Includes Supplementary Material

Three-dimensional nuclear spin positioning using coherent radio-frequency control

Distance measurements via the dipolar interaction are fundamental to the application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to molecular structure determination, but they only provide information on the absolute distance $r$ and polar angle $\theta$ between spins. In this Letter, we present a protocol to also retrieve the azimuth angle $\phi$. Our method relies on measuring the nuclear precession phase after application of a control pulse with a calibrated external radio-frequency coil. We experimentally demonstrate three-dimensional positioning of individual carbon-13 nuclear spins in a diamond host crystal relative to the central electronic spin of a single nitrogen-vacancy center. The ability to pinpoint three-dimensional nuclear locations is central for realizing a nanoscale NMR technique that can image the structure of single molecules with atomic resolution.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

High-bandwidth microcoil for fast nuclear spin control

The active manipulation of nuclear spins with radio-frequency (RF) coils is at the heart of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and spin-based quantum devices. Here, we present a microcoil transmitter system designed to generate strong RF pulses over a broad bandwidth, allowing for fast spin rotations on arbitrary nuclear species. Our design incorporates: (i) a planar multilayer geometry that generates a large field of 4.35 mT per unit current, (ii) a 50 Ohm transmission circuit with a broad excitation bandwidth of approximately 20 MHz, and (iii) an optimized thermal management for removal of Joule heating. Using individual 13C nuclear spins in the vicinity of a diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center as a test system, we demonstrate Rabi frequencies exceeding 70 kHz and nuclear pi/2 rotations within 3.4 us. The extrapolated values for 1H spins are about 240 kHz and 1 us, respectively. Beyond enabling fast nuclear spin manipulations, our microcoil system is ideally suited for the incorporation of advanced pulse sequences into micro- and nanoscale NMR detectors operating at low (<1 T) magnetic field.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to Rev. Sci. Inst

Perovskite solar cells prepared by flash evaporation

A simple vacuum deposition method for the preparation of high quality hybrid organic-inorganic methylammonium lead iodide perovskite thin films is reported. When sandwiched in between organic charge transporting layers, such films lead to solar cells with a power conversion efficiency of 12.2%

Spurious harmonic response of multipulse quantum sensing sequences

Multipulse sequences based on Carr-Purcell decoupling are frequently used for narrow-band signal detection in single spin magnetometry. We have analyzed the behavior of multipulse sensing sequences under real-world conditions, including finite pulse durations and the presence of detunings. We find that these non-idealities introduce harmonics to the filter function, allowing additional frequencies to pass the filter. In particular, we find that the XY family of sequences can generate signals at the 2fac, 4fac and 8fac harmonics and their odd subharmonics, where fac is the ac signal frequency. Consideration of the harmonic response is especially important for diamond-based nuclear spin sensing where the NMR frequency is used to identify the nuclear spin species, as it leads to ambiguities when several isotopes are present.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

Towards intuitionistic dynamic logic

We propose the beginnings of an intuitionistic propopsitional dynamic logic, and describe several serious open problems