Solid State Analog for He-McKellar-Wilkens Quantum Phase

In this letter we investigate the quantum dynamics of a quasiparticle in the presence of a charged screw dislocation submitted to a uniform magnetic field. Analysing the quantum scattering for this quasiparticle we observed the appearance of a topological quantum phase in the solution and demonstrate that this phenomenon is the solid state analog of the He-McKeller-Wilkens effect.Comment: 7 pages, epl styl

Geometric phases in open systems: an exact model to study how they are corrected by decoherence

We calculate the geometric phase for an open system (spin-boson model) which interacts with an environment (ohmic or nonohmic) at arbitrary temperature. However there have been many assumptions about the time scale at which the geometric phase can be measured, there has been no reported observation yet for mixed states under nonunitary evolution. We study not only how they are corrected by the presence of the different type of environments but also estimate the corresponding times at which decoherence becomes effective. These estimations should be taken into account when planning experimental setups to study the geometric phase in the nonunitary regime, particularly important for the application of fault-tolerant quantum computation.Comment: Revtex 4, 5 pages, one eps figure. Version Publishe

On the rise and fall of networked societies

We review recent results on the dynamics of social networks which suggest that the interplay between the network formation process and volatility may lead to the occurrence of discontinuous phase transitions and phase coexistence in a large class of models. We then investigate the effects of negative links -- links inhibiting local growth of the network -- and of a geographical distribution of the agents in such models. We show, by extensive numerical simulations, that both effects enhance this phenomenology, i.e. it increases the size of the coexistence region.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of Granada Workshop 200