Experimental Measurement-Device-Independent Quantum Steering and Randomness Generation Beyond Qubits

In a measurement-device-independent or quantum-refereed protocol, a referee can verify whether two parties share entanglement or Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering without the need to trust either of the parties or their devices. The need for trusting a party is substituted by a quantum channel between the referee and that party, through which the referee encodes the measurements to be performed on that party's subsystem in a set of nonorthogonal quantum states. In this Letter, an EPR-steering inequality is adapted as a quantum-refereed EPR-steering witness, and the trust-free experimental verification of higher dimensional quantum steering is reported via preparing a class of entangled photonic qutrits. Further, with two measurement settings, we extract $1.106\pm0.023$ bits of private randomness per every photon pair from our observed data, which surpasses the one-bit limit for projective measurements performed on qubit systems. Our results advance research on quantum information processing tasks beyond qubits.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure

The Online Data Quality Monitoring System at BESIII

The online Data Quality Monitoring (DQM) plays an important role in the data taking process of HEP experiments. BESIII DQM samples data from online data flow, reconstructs them with offline reconstruction software, and automatically analyzes the reconstructed data with user-defined algorithms. The DQM software is a scalable distributed system. The monitored results are gathered and displayed in various formats, which provides the shifter with current run information that can be used to find problems early. This paper gives an overview of DQM system at BESIII.Comment: Already submit to Chinese Physics

Gut-Brain Axis: Probiotic, <em>Bacillus subtilis</em>, Prevents Aggression via the Modification of the Central Serotonergic System

Intestinal bacteria release various neuroactive compounds directly or indirectly regulating brain function to modulate host health and behavior through the gut-brain axis. Probiotics have been used as dietary supplements to target gut microbiota (microbiome) for prevention or therapeutic treatment of various diseases including mental disorders. In our study, chickens were used as an animal model to assess, if dietary supplementation of probiotic, Bacillus subtilis, reduces aggressive behaviors following social challenge. Chickens of an aggressive line were housed in single-hen cages. At 24 weeks of age, the hens were paired with similar body weight to identify the dominance rank (day 0). The subordinate and dominant of each pair were fed a regular layer diet or the diet mixed with 250 ppm probiotics for 2 weeks, then the second behavior test was performed between the same pair (day 14). The display of aggressive behaviors in the regular diet-fed chickens was not affected between the levels at day 0 and day 14, while the frequency of threat and aggressive pecking were reduced in the probiotic-fed chickens compared to the levels at day 0. These results suggest dietary probiotic, Bacillus subtilis, could be a suitable strategy for increasing hosts’ mental health

A simulation study on the measurement of D0-D0bar mixing parameter y at BES-III

We established a method on measuring the \dzdzb mixing parameter $y$ for BESIII experiment at the BEPCII $e^+e^-$ collider. In this method, the doubly tagged $\psi(3770) \to D^0 \overline{D^0}$ events, with one $D$ decays to CP-eigenstates and the other $D$ decays semileptonically, are used to reconstruct the signals. Since this analysis requires good $e/\pi$ separation, a likelihood approach, which combines the $dE/dx$, time of flight and the electromagnetic shower detectors information, is used for particle identification. We estimate the sensitivity of the measurement of $y$ to be 0.007 based on a $20fb^{-1}$ fully simulated MC sample.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

Improved Constraints on Sterile Neutrino Mixing from Disappearance Searches in the MINOS, MINOS+, Daya Bay, and Bugey-3 Experiments.

Searches for electron antineutrino, muon neutrino, and muon antineutrino disappearance driven by sterile neutrino mixing have been carried out by the Daya Bay and MINOS+ collaborations. This Letter presents the combined results of these searches, along with exclusion results from the Bugey-3 reactor experiment, framed in a minimally extended four-neutrino scenario. Significantly improved constraints on the θ_{μe} mixing angle are derived that constitute the most constraining limits to date over five orders of magnitude in the mass-squared splitting Δm_{41}^{2}, excluding the 90%&nbsp;C.L. sterile-neutrino parameter space allowed by the LSND and MiniBooNE observations at 90%&nbsp;CL_{s} for Δm_{41}^{2}&lt;13  eV^{2}. Furthermore, the LSND and MiniBooNE 99%&nbsp;C.L. allowed regions are excluded at 99% CL_{s} for Δm_{41}^{2}&lt;1.6 eV^{2}