8,421 research outputs found
System Design for a Nuclear Electric Spacecraft Utilizing Out-of-core Thermionic Conversion
Basic guidelines are presented for a nuclear space power system which utilizes heat pipes to transport thermal power from a fast nuclear reactor to an out of core thermionic converter array. Design parameters are discussed for the nuclear reactor, heat pipes, thermionic converters, shields (neutron and gamma), waste heat rejection systems, and the electrical bus bar-cable system required to transport the high current/low voltage power to the processing equipment. Dimensions are compatible with shuttle payload bay constraints
Effects of Kinks on DNA Elasticity
We study the elastic response of a worm-like polymer chain with reversible
kink-like structural defects. This is a generic model for (a) the
double-stranded DNA with sharp bends induced by binding of certain proteins,
and (b) effects of trans-gauche rotations in the backbone of the
single-stranded DNA. The problem is solved both analytically and numerically by
generalizing the well-known analogy to the Quantum Rotator. In the small
stretching force regime, we find that the persistence length is renormalized
due to the presence of the kinks. In the opposite regime, the response to the
strong stretching is determined solely by the bare persistence length with
exponential corrections due to the ``ideal gas of kinks''. This high-force
behavior changes significantly in the limit of high bending rigidity of the
chain. In that case, the leading corrections to the mechanical response are
likely to be due to the formation of multi-kink structures, such as kink pairs.Comment: v1: 16 pages, 7 figures, LaTeX; submitted to Physical Review E; v2: a
new subsection on soft kinks added to section Theory, sections Introduction
and Conclusions expanded, references added, other minor changes; v3: a
reference adde
NP-hardness of decoding quantum error-correction codes
Though the theory of quantum error correction is intimately related to the
classical coding theory, in particular, one can construct quantum error
correction codes (QECCs) from classical codes with the dual containing
property, this does not necessarily imply that the computational complexity of
decoding QECCs is the same as their classical counterparts. Instead, decoding
QECCs can be very much different from decoding classical codes due to the
degeneracy property. Intuitively, one expect degeneracy would simplify the
decoding since two different errors might not and need not be distinguished in
order to correct them. However, we show that general quantum decoding problem
is NP-hard regardless of the quantum codes being degenerate or non-degenerate.
This finding implies that no considerably fast decoding algorithm exists for
the general quantum decoding problems, and suggests the existence of a quantum
cryptosystem based on the hardness of decoding QECCs.Comment: 5 pages, no figure. Final version for publicatio
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