1945’s Forgotten Insight: Multilateralism as Realist Necessity

The 70th anniversary of the signing and entry into force of the UN Charter provided an occasion to explore the historical underpinnings of contemporary global governance. This article redresses the neglect of the United Nations as a multilateral structure before the conference that drafted the Charter in 1945. It rehabilitates an underappreciated aspect of the period that began on January 1, 1942, with the “Declaration by United Nations,” namely, the combination of multilateral strategies for military and human security to achieve victory in war and peace. The wide substantive and geographic resonance suggests the extent to which the pressures of the second war to end all wars helped states to overcome their disinclination to collaborate. Today’s fashionable calls for “good enough” global governance abandon the strategy of constructing robust intergovernmental organizations; they are not good enough, especially, because our forebears did much better. Many insights and operational approaches from 1942 to 1945 remain valid for addressing twenty-first-century global challenges

The UN War Crimes Commission and International Law: Revisiting World War II Precedents and Practice

The history of international legal institutions has largely ignored the early activities of the United Nations, specifically of the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). Based on an assessment of its work and with access to new archival evidence, contemporary international legal institutional design could benefit significantly from revisiting the commission’s achievements, particularly the principle of complementarity identified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and support for domestic tribunals for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The article begins by examining the history, multilateral basis for, and practical activities of the commission. Subsequently, it assesses its contemporary relevance. Finally, it analyses—with reference to modern literature on complementarity—the degree to which the commission’s wartime model provides positive examples of implementation of the principle that could be replicated today, with particular reference to domestic capacity-building and international coordination

A classification of entanglement in three-qubit systems

We present a classification of three-qubit states based in their three-qubit and reduced two-qubit entanglements. For pure states these criteria can be easily implemented, and the different types can be related with sets of equivalence classes under Local Unitary operations. For mixed states characterization of full tripartite entanglement is not yet solved in general; some partial results will be presented here.Comment: Shortened version. Accepted in EPJ

High-fidelity state detection and tomography of a single ion Zeeman qubit

We demonstrate high-fidelity Zeeman qubit state detection in a single trapped 88 Sr+ ion. Qubit readout is performed by shelving one of the qubit states to a metastable level using a narrow linewidth diode laser at 674 nm followed by state-selective fluorescence detection. The average fidelity reached for the readout of the qubit state is 0.9989(1). We then measure the fidelity of state tomography, averaged over all possible single-qubit states, which is 0.9979(2). We also fully characterize the detection process using quantum process tomography. This readout fidelity is compatible with recent estimates of the detection error-threshold required for fault-tolerant computation, whereas high-fidelity state tomography opens the way for high-precision quantum process tomography

Automatic Reconstruction of Fault Networks from Seismicity Catalogs: 3D Optimal Anisotropic Dynamic Clustering

We propose a new pattern recognition method that is able to reconstruct the 3D structure of the active part of a fault network using the spatial location of earthquakes. The method is a generalization of the so-called dynamic clustering method, that originally partitions a set of datapoints into clusters, using a global minimization criterion over the spatial inertia of those clusters. The new method improves on it by taking into account the full spatial inertia tensor of each cluster, in order to partition the dataset into fault-like, anisotropic clusters. Given a catalog of seismic events, the output is the optimal set of plane segments that fits the spatial structure of the data. Each plane segment is fully characterized by its location, size and orientation. The main tunable parameter is the accuracy of the earthquake localizations, which fixes the resolution, i.e. the residual variance of the fit. The resolution determines the number of fault segments needed to describe the earthquake catalog, the better the resolution, the finer the structure of the reconstructed fault segments. The algorithm reconstructs successfully the fault segments of synthetic earthquake catalogs. Applied to the real catalog constituted of a subset of the aftershocks sequence of the 28th June 1992 Landers earthquake in Southern California, the reconstructed plane segments fully agree with faults already known on geological maps, or with blind faults that appear quite obvious on longer-term catalogs. Future improvements of the method are discussed, as well as its potential use in the multi-scale study of the inner structure of fault zones

Relational interpretation of the wave function and a possible way around Bell's theorem

The famous ``spooky action at a distance'' in the EPR-szenario is shown to be a local interaction, once entanglement is interpreted as a kind of ``nearest neighbor'' relation among quantum systems. Furthermore, the wave function itself is interpreted as encoding the ``nearest neighbor'' relations between a quantum system and spatial points. This interpretation becomes natural, if we view space and distance in terms of relations among spatial points. Therefore, ``position'' becomes a purely relational concept. This relational picture leads to a new perspective onto the quantum mechanical formalism, where many of the ``weird'' aspects, like the particle-wave duality, the non-locality of entanglement, or the ``mystery'' of the double-slit experiment, disappear. Furthermore, this picture cirumvents the restrictions set by Bell's inequalities, i.e., a possible (realistic) hidden variable theory based on these concepts can be local and at the same time reproduce the results of quantum mechanics.Comment: Accepted for publication in "International Journal of Theoretical Physics