Entanglement without Dissipation: A Touchstone for an exact Comparison of Entanglement Measures

Entanglement, which is an essential characteristic of quantum mechanics, is the key element in potential practical quantum information and quantum communication systems. However, there are many open and fundamental questions (relating to entanglement measures, sudden death, etc.) that require a deeper understanding. Thus, we are motivated to investigate a simple but non-trivial correlated two-body continuous variable system in the absence of a heat bath, which facilitates an \underline{exact} measure of the entanglement at all times. In particular, we find that the results obtained from all well-known existing entanglement measures agree with each other but that, in practice, some are more straightforward to use than others

Information and entropy in quantum Brownian motion: Thermodynamic entropy versus von Neumann entropy

We compare the thermodynamic entropy of a quantum Brownian oscillator derived from the partition function of the subsystem with the von Neumann entropy of its reduced density matrix. At low temperatures we find deviations between these two entropies which are due to the fact that the Brownian particle and its environment are entangled. We give an explanation for these findings and point out that these deviations become important in cases where statements about the information capacity of the subsystem are associated with thermodynamic properties, as it is the case for the Landauer principle.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Entropy of a Quantum Oscillator coupled to a Heat Bath and implications for Quantum Thermodynamics

The free energy of a quantum oscillator in an arbitrary heat bath at a temperature T is given by a "remarkable formula" which involves only a single integral. This leads to a corresponding simple result for the entropy. The low temperature limit is examined in detail and we obtain explicit results both for the case of an Ohmic heat bath and a radiation heat bath. More general heat bath models are also examined. This enables us to determine the entropy at zero temperature in order to check the third law of thermodynamics in the quantum regimeComment: International Conference on "Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamics

Cosmological gravitino problem confronts electroweak physics

A generic feature of gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking models is that the gravitino is the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). In order not to overclose the universe, the gravitino LSP should be light enough (~ 1 keV), or appropriately heavy (~ 1 GeV). We study further constraints on the mass of the gravitino imposed by electroweak experiments, i.e., muon g-2 measurements, electroweak precision measurements, and direct searches for supersymmetric particles at LEP2. We find that the heavy gravitino is strongly disfavored from the lower mass bound on the next-to-LSP. The sufficiently light gravitino, on the other hand, has rather sizable allowed regions in the model parameter space.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, version to appear in PR

Neutrino-induced lepton flavor violation in gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking

Gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking is known to greatly suppress flavor changing neutral current effects. However, we show that gauge mediation in the context of leptogenesis implies potentially large lepton flavor violating signals. If the heavy right-handed neutrinos that participate in leptogenesis are lighter than the messenger scale of gauge mediation, they will induce flavor off-diagonal masses to the sleptons which in turn can induce large effects in mu to e gamma, tau to mu gamma, and mu-e conversion in nuclei. We demonstrate this result and compute numerically the lepton-flavor violating decay and conversion rates in scenarios of direct gauge mediation.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Moduli Instability in Warped Compactifications of the Type IIB Supergravity

We show that the conifold and deformed-conifold warped compactifications of the ten-dimensional type IIB supergravity, including the Klebanov-Strassler solution, are dynamically unstable in the moduli sector representing the scale of a Calabi-Yau space, although it can be practically stable for a quite long time in a region with a large warp factor. This instability is associated with complete supersymmetry breaking except for a special case and produces significant time-dependence in the structure of the four-dimensional base spacetime as well as of the internal space.Comment: 24 pages, no figure. Typos corrected, and some arguments in section 5 are adde

Probing mSUGRA via the Extreme Universe Space Observatory

An analysis is carried out within mSUGRA of the estimated number of events originating from upward moving ultra-high energy neutralinos that could be detected by the Extreme Universe Space Observatory (EUSO). The analysis exploits a recently proposed technique that differentiates ultra-high energy neutralinos from ultra-high energy neutrinos using their different absorption lengths in the Earth's crust. It is shown that for a significant part of the parameter space, where the neutralino is mostly a Bino and with squark mass $\sim 1$ TeV, EUSO could see ultra-high energy neutralino events with essentially no background. In the energy range 10^9 GeV < E < 10^11 GeV, the unprecedented aperture of EUSO makes the telescope sensitive to neutralino fluxes as low as 1.1 \times 10^{-6} (E/GeV)^{-1.3} GeV^{-1} cm^{-2} yr^{-1} sr^{-1}, at the 95% CL. Such a hard spectrum is characteristic of supermassive particles' $N$-body hadronic decay. The case in which the flux of ultra-high energy neutralinos is produced via decay of metastable heavy particles with uniform distribution throughout the universe is analyzed in detail. The normalization of the ratio of the relics' density to their lifetime has been fixed so that the baryon flux produced in the supermassive particle decays contributes to about 1/3 of the events reported by the AGASA Collaboration below 10^{11} GeV, and hence the associated GeV gamma-ray flux is in complete agreement with EGRET data. For this particular case, EUSO will collect between 4 and 5 neutralino events (with 0.3 of background) in ~ 3 yr of running. NASA's planned mission, the Orbiting Wide-angle Light-collectors (OWL), is also briefly discussed in this context.Comment: Some discussion added, final version to be published in Physical Review

Molecular epidemiology of penicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia in Australia and reliability of diagnostic phenotypic susceptibility methods to detect penicillin susceptibility

Background: Defined by the emergence of antibiotic resistant strains, Staphylococcus aureus is a priority bacterial species with high antibiotic resistance. However, a rise in the prevalence of penicillin-susceptible S. aureus (PSSA) bloodstream infections has recently been observed worldwide, including in Australia, where the proportion of methicillin-susceptible S. aureus causing bacteremia identified phenotypically as penicillin-susceptible has increased by over 35%, from 17.5% in 2013 to 23.7% in 2020. Objectives: To determine the population structure of PSSA causing community- and hospital-onset bacteremia in Australia and to evaluate routine phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility methods to reliably confirm penicillin resistance on blaZ-positive S. aureus initially classified as penicillin-susceptible by the Vitek® 2 automated microbiology system. Results: Whole genome sequencing on 470 PSSA collected in the 2020 Australian Group on Antimicrobial Resistance Australian Staphylococcus aureus Sepsis Outcome Programme identified 84 multilocus sequence types (STs), of which 79 (463 isolates) were grouped into 22 clonal complexes (CCs). The dominant CCs included CC5 (31.9%), CC97 (10.2%), CC45 (10.0%), CC15 (8.7%), and CC188 (4.9%). Many of the CCs had multiple STs and spa types and, based on the immune evasion cluster type, isolates within a CC could be classified into different strains harboring a range of virulence and resistance genes. Phylogenetic analyses of the isolates showed most CCs were represented by one clade. The blaZ gene was identified in 45 (9.6%) PSSA. Although multiclonal, approximately 50% of blaZ-positive PSSA were from CC15 and were found to be genetically distant from the blaZ-negative CC15 PSSA. The broth microdilution, Etest® and cefinase, performed poorly; however, when the appearance of the zone edge was considered; as per the EUCAST and CLSI criteria, disc diffusion detected 100% of blaZ-positive PSSA. Conclusions: In Australia, PSSA bacteremia is not caused by the expansion of a single clone. Approximately 10% of S. aureus classified as penicillin-susceptible by the Vitek® 2 harbored blaZ. Consequently, we recommend that confirmation of Vitek® 2 PSSA be performed using an alternative method, such as disc diffusion with careful interpretation of the zone edge

On MSSM charged Higgs boson production in association with an electroweak W boson at electron positron colliders

We present a calculation of the cross section for the process e+ e- --> W+/- H-/+ in the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) and the Two Higgs Doublet Model (THDM). We study the basic features of the MSSM prediction for some distinctive parameter scenarios. We find large effects from virtual squarks for scenarios with large mixing in the stop sector which can lead to a cross section vastly different from a THDM with identical Higgs sector parameters. We investigate this interesting behaviour in more detail by thoroughly scanning the MSSM parameter space for regions of large cross section. For a charged Higgs boson too heavy to be pair-produced at such a machine, it turns out that a large MSSM cross section with a good chance of observation is linked to a squark mass scale below 600 GeV and a considerable amount of mixing in either the stop and sbottom sector.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures (two in colour). Substantially improved on the MSSM parameter restrictions taken into account. Added some reference

Dyson Pairs and Zero-Mass Black Holes

It has been argued by Dyson in the context of QED in flat spacetime that perturbative expansions in powers of the electric charge e cannot be convergent because if e is purely imaginary then the vacuum should be unstable to the production of charged pairs. We investigate the spontaneous production of such Dyson pairs in electrodynamics coupled to gravity. They are found to consist of pairs of zero-rest mass black holes with regular horizons. The properties of these zero rest mass black holes are discussed. We also consider ways in which a dilaton may be included and the relevance of this to recent ideas in string theory. We discuss accelerating solutions and find that, in certain circumstances, the `no strut' condition may be satisfied giving a regular solution describing a pair of zero rest mass black holes accelerating away from one another. We also study wormhole and tachyonic solutions and how they affect the stability of the vacuum.Comment: 41 pages LaTex, 5 figure