Development of a Miniature Electrostatic Accelerometer /MESA/ for low g applications Summary report

Design, fabrication, and testing of miniature digital electrostatic accelerometer for low gravity measurements in spac

A Right to Record: An Analysis of the Legal Issues Surrounding Cell Phone Videos of Police Violence

Smartphones have become ubiquitous in modern society, increasing the likelihood of being caught on camera. On July 17th, 2014, a cell phone video of Staten Island police officers wrongfully killing Eric Garner reignited a national controversy on the nature of police violence, and set off a wave of citizen-surveillance through cell phones. By reviewing prior 1st and 4th Amendment court cases, I argue that citizens do indeed have a right to record on-duty police officers, and police do not have the right to conduct a warrantless search or seizure of a phone. Although a case involving citizen-surveillance of law enforcement has not yet reached the Supreme Court, based on the current balance of power as well as prior cases, it is likely that these videos would be declared a protected form of speech under the 1st Amendment

Heuristic for estimation of multiqubit genuine multipartite entanglement

For every N-qubit density matrix written in the computational basis, an associated "X-density matrix" can be obtained by vanishing all entries out of the main- and anti-diagonals. It is very simple to compute the genuine multipartite (GM) concurrence of this associated N-qubit X-state, which, moreover, lower bounds the GM-concurrence of the original (non-X) state. In this paper, we rely on these facts to introduce and benchmark a heuristic for estimating the GM-concurrence of an arbitrary multiqubit mixed state. By explicitly considering two classes of mixed states, we illustrate that our estimates are usually very close to the standard lower bound on the GM-concurrence, being significantly easier to compute. In addition, while evaluating the performance of our proposed heuristic, we provide the first characterization of GM-entanglement in the steady states of the driven Dicke model at zero temperature.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figure

Quantum state transfer between a Bose-Einstein condensate and an optomechanical mirror

In this paper we describe a scheme for state transfer between a trapped atomic Bose condensate and an optomechanical end-mirror mediated by a cavity field. Coupling between the mirror and the cold gas arises from the fact that the cavity field can produce density oscillations in the gas which in turn acts as an internal Bragg mirror for the field. After adiabatic elimination of the cavity field we find that the hybrid system of the gas and mirror is described by a beam splitter Hamiltonian that allows for state transfer, but only if the quantum nature of the cavity field is retained

Giant Kerr nonlinearities in Circuit-QED

The very small size of optical nonlinearities places wide ranging restrictions on the types of novel physics one can explore. For an ensemble of multi-level systems one can synthesize a large effective optical nonlinearity using quantum coherence effects but such non-linearities are technically extremely challenging to demonstrate at the single atom level. In this work we describe how a single artificial multi-level Cooper Pair Box molecule, interacting with a superconducting microwave coplanar waveguide resonator, when suitably driven, can generate extremely large optical nonlinearities at microwave frequencies, with no associated absorption. We describe how the giant self-Kerr effect can be detected by measuring the second-order correlation function and quadrature squeezing spectrum.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, 1 table; version accepted by PRL edito

Continuous quantum non-demolition measurement of Fock states of a nanoresonator using feedback-controlled circuit QED

We propose a scheme for the quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement of Fock states of a nanomechanical resonator via feedback control of a coupled circuit QED system. A Cooper pair box (CPB) is coupled to both the nanoresonator and microwave cavity. The CPB is read-out via homodyne detection on the cavity and feedback control is used to effect a non-dissipative measurement of the CPB. This realizes an indirect QND measurement of the nanoresonator via a second-order coupling of the CPB to the nanoresonator number operator. The phonon number of the Fock state may be determined by integrating the stochastic master equation derived, or by processing of the measurement signal.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Quantum Estimation of Parameters of Classical Spacetimes

We describe a quantum limit to measurement of classical spacetimes. Specifically, we formulate a quantum Cramer-Rao lower bound for estimating the single parameter in any one-parameter family of spacetime metrics. We employ the locally covariant formulation of quantum field theory in curved spacetime, which allows for a manifestly background-independent derivation. The result is an uncertainty relation that applies to all globally hyperbolic spacetimes. Among other examples, we apply our method to detection of gravitational waves using the electromagnetic field as a probe, as in laser-interferometric gravitational-wave detectors. Other applications are discussed, from terrestrial gravimetry to cosmology.Comment: 23 pages. This article supersedes arXiv:1108.522