1,136 research outputs found
The Role of Stress in the Pathogenesis and Maintenance of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder often identify psychosocial stress as a factor that exacerbates their symptoms, and many trace the onset of symptoms to a stressful period of life or a discrete traumatic incident. However, the pathophysiological relationship between stress and obsessive-compulsive disorder remains poorly characterized: it is unclear whether trauma or stress is an independent cause of obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms, a triggering factor that interacts with a preexisting diathesis, or simply a nonspecific factor that can exacerbate obsessive-compulsive disorder along with other aspects of psychiatric symptomatology. Nonetheless, preclinical research has demonstrated that stress has conspicuous effects on corticostriatal and limbic circuitry. Specifically, stress can lead to neuronal atrophy in frontal cortices (particularly the medial prefrontal cortex), the dorsomedial striatum (caudate), and the hippocampus. Stress can also result in neuronal hypertrophy in the dorsolateral striatum (putamen) and amygdala. These neurobiological effects mirror reported neural abnormalities in obsessive-compulsive disorder and may contribute to an imbalance between goal-directed and habitual behavior, an imbalance that is implicated in the pathogenesis and expression of obsessive-compulsive disorder symptomatology. The modulation of corticostriatal and limbic circuits by stress and the resultant imbalance between habit and goal-directed learning and behavior offers a framework for investigating how stress may exacerbate or trigger obsessive-compulsive disorder symptomatology
Symmetric Informationally Complete Measurements of Arbitrary Rank
There has been much interest in so-called SIC-POVMs: rank 1 symmetric
informationally complete positive operator valued measures. In this paper we
discuss the larger class of POVMs which are symmetric and informationally
complete but not necessarily rank 1. This class of POVMs is of some independent
interest. In particular it includes a POVM which is closely related to the
discrete Wigner function. However, it is interesting mainly because of the
light it casts on the problem of constructing rank 1 symmetric informationally
complete POVMs. In this connection we derive an extremal condition alternative
to the one derived by Renes et al.Comment: Contribution to proceedings of International Conference on Quantum
Optics, Minsk, 200
Robust control of decoherence in realistic one-qubit quantum gates
We present an open loop (bang-bang) scheme to control decoherence in a
generic one-qubit quantum gate and implement it in a realistic simulation. The
system is consistently described within the spin-boson model, with interactions
accounting for both adiabatic and thermal decoherence. The external control is
included from the beginning in the Hamiltonian as an independent interaction
term. After tracing out the environment modes, reduced equations are obtained
for the two-level system in which the effects of both decoherence and external
control appear explicitly. The controls are determined exactly from the
condition to eliminate decoherence, i.e. to restore unitarity. Numerical
simulations show excellent performance and robustness of the proposed control
scheme.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, VIth International Conference on Quantum
Communication, Measurement and Computing (Boston, 2002
Separability and Fourier representations of density matrices
Using the finite Fourier transform, we introduce a generalization of
Pauli-spin matrices for -dimensional spaces, and the resulting set of
unitary matrices is a basis for matrices. If and H^{[ N]}=\bigotimes H^{% [ d_{k}]}, we give a
sufficient condition for separability of a density matrix relative to
the in terms of the norm of the spin coefficients of
Since the spin representation depends on the form of the tensor
product, the theory applies to both full and partial separability on a given
space % . It follows from this result that for a prescribed form of
separability, there is always a neighborhood of the normalized identity in
which every density matrix is separable. We also show that for every prime
and the generalized Werner density matrix is fully
separable if and only if
Quantum Measurement of a Single Spin using Magnetic Resonance Force Microscopy
Single-spin detection is one of the important challenges facing the
development of several new technologies, e.g. single-spin transistors and
solid-state quantum computation. Magnetic resonance force microscopy with a
cyclic adiabatic inversion, which utilizes a cantilever oscillations driven by
a single spin, is a promising technique to solve this problem. We have studied
the quantum dynamics of a single spin interacting with a quasiclassical
cantilever. It was found that in a similar fashion to the Stern-Gerlach
interferometer the quantum dynamics generates a quantum superposition of two
quasiclassical trajectories of the cantilever which are related to the two spin
projections on the direction of the effective magnetic field in the rotating
reference frame. Our results show that quantum jumps will not prevent a
single-spin measurement if the coupling between the cantilever vibrations and
the spin is small in comparison with the amplitude of the radio-frequency
external field.Comment: 16 pages RevTeX including 4 figure
Detection of multipartite entanglement with two-body correlations
We show how to detect entanglement with criteria built from simple two-body
correlation terms. Since many natural Hamiltonians are sums of such correlation
terms, our ideas can be used to detect entanglement by energy measurement. Our
criteria can straightforwardly be applied for detecting different forms of
multipartite entanglement in familiar spin models in thermal equilibrium.Comment: 5 pages including 2 figures, LaTeX; for the proceedings of the DPG
spring meeting, Berlin, March 200
Wigner Functions and Separability for Finite Systems
A discussion of discrete Wigner functions in phase space related to mutually
unbiased bases is presented. This approach requires mathematical assumptions
which limits it to systems with density matrices defined on complex Hilbert
spaces of dimension p^n where p is a prime number. With this limitation it is
possible to define a phase space and Wigner functions in close analogy to the
continuous case. That is, we use a phase space that is a direct sum of n
two-dimensional vector spaces each containing p^2 points. This is in contrast
to the more usual choice of a two-dimensional phase space containing p^(2n)
points. A useful aspect of this approach is that we can relate complete
separability of density matrices and their Wigner functions in a natural way.
We discuss this in detail for bipartite systems and present the generalization
to arbitrary numbers of subsystems when p is odd. Special attention is required
for two qubits (p=2) and our technique fails to establish the separability
property for more than two qubits.Comment: Some misprints have been corrected and a proof of the separability of
the A matrices has been adde
An overview of the first 5 years of the ENIGMA obsessive–compulsive disorder working group: The power of worldwide collaboration
Abstract Neuroimaging has played an important part in advancing our understanding of the neurobiology of obsessive?compulsive disorder (OCD). At the same time, neuroimaging studies of OCD have had notable limitations, including reliance on relatively small samples. International collaborative efforts to increase statistical power by combining samples from across sites have been bolstered by the ENIGMA consortium; this provides specific technical expertise for conducting multi-site analyses, as well as access to a collaborative community of neuroimaging scientists. In this article, we outline the background to, development of, and initial findings from ENIGMA's OCD working group, which currently consists of 47 samples from 34 institutes in 15 countries on 5 continents, with a total sample of 2,323 OCD patients and 2,325 healthy controls. Initial work has focused on studies of cortical thickness and subcortical volumes, structural connectivity, and brain lateralization in children, adolescents and adults with OCD, also including the study on the commonalities and distinctions across different neurodevelopment disorders. Additional work is ongoing, employing machine learning techniques. Findings to date have contributed to the development of neurobiological models of OCD, have provided an important model of global scientific collaboration, and have had a number of clinical implications. Importantly, our work has shed new light on questions about whether structural and functional alterations found in OCD reflect neurodevelopmental changes, effects of the disease process, or medication impacts. We conclude with a summary of ongoing work by ENIGMA-OCD, and a consideration of future directions for neuroimaging research on OCD within and beyond ENIGMA
Plasmas and Controlled Nuclear Fusion
Contains research objectives and reports on four research projects.U. S. Atomic Energy Commission (Contract AT(30-1)-3980)U. S. Atomic Energy Commission (GK-2581
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