Testing excitation models of rapidly oscillating Ap stars with interferometry

Rapidly oscillating Ap stars are unique objects in the potential they offer to study the interplay between a number of important physical phenomena, in particular, pulsations, magnetic fields, diffusion, and convection. Nevertheless, the simple understanding of how the observed pulsations are excited in these stars is still in progress. In this work we perform a test to what is possibly the most widely accepted excitation theory for this class of stellar pulsators. The test is based on the study of a subset of members of this class for which stringent data on the fundamental parameters are available thanks to interferometry. For three out of the four stars considered in this study, we find that linear, non-adiabatic models with envelope convection suppressed around the magnetic poles can reproduce well the frequency region where oscillations are observed. For the fourth star in our sample no agreement is found, indicating that a new excitation mechanism must be considered. For the three stars whose observed frequencies can be explained by the excitation models under discussion, we derive the minimum angular extent of the region where convection must be suppressed. Finally, we find that the frequency regions where modes are expected to be excited in these models is very sensitive to the stellar radius. This opens the interesting possibility of determining this quantity and related ones, such as the effective temperature or luminosity, from comparison between model predictions and observations, in other targets for which these parameters are not well determined.Comment: Accepted for publication in the MNRA

Seismic signatures of stellar cores of solar-like pulsators: dependence on mass and age

Useful information from the inner layers of stellar pulsators may be derived from the study of their oscillations. In this paper we analyse three diagnostic tools suggested in the literature built from the oscillation frequencies computed for a set of main sequence models with masses between $1.0\, {\rm M}_{\odot}$ and $1.6\, {\rm M}_{\odot}$, to check what information they may hold about stellar cores. For the models with convective cores ($M \geq 1.2\,{\rm M}_{\odot}$) we find a relation between the frequency slopes of the diagnostic tools and the size of the jump in the sound speed at the edge of the core. We show that this relation is independent of the mass of the models. In practice, since the size of the jump in the sound speed is related to the age of the star, using these seismic tools we may, in principle, infer the star's evolutionary state. We also show that when combining two of the three diagnostic tools studied, we are able to distinguish models with convective cores from models without a convective core but with strong sound-speed gradients in the inner layers

On the inference of stellar ages and convective-core properties in main-sequence solar-like pulsators

Particular diagnostic tools may isolate the signature left on the oscillation frequencies by the presence of a small convective core. Their frequency derivative is expected to provide information about convective core's properties and stellar age. The main goal of this work is to study the potential of the diagnostic tools with regards to the inference of stellar age and stellar core's properties. For that, we computed diagnostic tools and their frequency derivatives from the oscillation frequencies of main-sequence models with masses between 1.0 and $1.6\,{\rm\,M}_{\odot}$ and with different physics. We considered the dependence of the diagnostic tools on stellar age and on the size of the relative discontinuity in the squared sound speed at the edge of the convectively unstable region. We find that the absolute value of the frequency derivatives of the diagnostic tools increases as the star evolves on the main sequence. The fraction of stellar main-sequence evolution for models with masses $>1.2\,{\rm\,M}_{\odot}$ may be estimated from the frequency derivatives of two of the diagnostic tools. For lower mass models, constraints on the convective core's overshoot can potentially be derived based on the analysis of the same derivatives. For at least 35 per cent of our sample of stellar models the frequency derivative of the diagnostic tools takes its maximum absolute value on the frequency range where observed oscillations may be expected.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, published in MNRA

Entanglement and Bell's inequality violation above room temperature in metal carboxylates

In the present work we show that a special family of materials, the metal carboxylates, may have entangled states up to very high temperatures. From magnetic susceptibility measurements, we have estimated the critical temperature below which entanglement exists in the cooper carboxylate \{Cu$_2$(O$_2$CH)$_4$\}\{Cu(O$_2$CH)$_2$(2-methylpyridine)$_2$\}, and we have found this to be above room temperature ($T_e \sim 630$ K). Furthermore, the results show that the system remains maximally entangled until close to $\sim 100$ K and the Bell's inequality is violated up to nearly room temperature ($\sim 290$ K)

Faithful Squashed Entanglement

Squashed entanglement is a measure for the entanglement of bipartite quantum states. In this paper we present a lower bound for squashed entanglement in terms of a distance to the set of separable states. This implies that squashed entanglement is faithful, that is, strictly positive if and only if the state is entangled. We derive the bound on squashed entanglement from a bound on quantum conditional mutual information, which is used to define squashed entanglement and corresponds to the amount by which strong subadditivity of von Neumann entropy fails to be saturated. Our result therefore sheds light on the structure of states that almost satisfy strong subadditivity with equality. The proof is based on two recent results from quantum information theory: the operational interpretation of the quantum mutual information as the optimal rate for state redistribution and the interpretation of the regularised relative entropy of entanglement as an error exponent in hypothesis testing. The distance to the set of separable states is measured by the one-way LOCC norm, an operationally-motivated norm giving the optimal probability of distinguishing two bipartite quantum states, each shared by two parties, using any protocol formed by local quantum operations and one-directional classical communication between the parties. A similar result for the Frobenius or Euclidean norm follows immediately. The result has two applications in complexity theory. The first is a quasipolynomial-time algorithm solving the weak membership problem for the set of separable states in one-way LOCC or Euclidean norm. The second concerns quantum Merlin-Arthur games. Here we show that multiple provers are not more powerful than a single prover when the verifier is restricted to one-way LOCC operations thereby providing a new characterisation of the complexity class QMA.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. Due to an error in the published version, claims have been weakened from the LOCC norm to the one-way LOCC nor

Orofacial manifestations in outpatients with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa focusing on the vomiting behavior

Objective: This case-control study aims to evaluate the oral health status and orofacial problems in a group of outpatients with eating disorders (ED)—either anorexia nervosa (AN) or bulimia nervosa (BN)—further focusing on the influence of vomit. Materials and methods: Fifty-five women outpatients with AN or BN diagnosis were invited to participate, of which 33 agreed. ED outpatients and matched controls were submitted to a questionnaire and clinical oral examination. Results: Multivariate analysis identified a significantly higher incidence of teeth-related complications (i.e., tooth decay, dental erosion, and self-reported dentin hypersensitivity), periodontal disease, salivary alterations (i.e., hyposalivation and xerostomia), and oral mucosa-related complications in ED outpatients. Dental erosion, self-reported dentin hypersensitivity, hyposalivation, xerostomia, and angular cheilitis were found to be highly correlated with the vomiting behavior. Conclusions: ED outpatients were found to present a higher incidence of oral-related complications and an inferior oral health status, compared to gender- and age-matched controls. Alterations verified within outpatients were acknowledged to be quite similar to those previously reported within inpatients, in both of nature and severity, thus sustaining that the cranio-maxillofacial region is significantly affected by ED, even in the early/milder forms of the condition, as expectedly verified within outpatients.The work was supported by the Faculty of Dental Medicine, U. Porto

Experimental implementation of a NMR entanglement witness

Entanglement witnesses (EW) allow the detection of entanglement in a quantum system, from the measurement of some few observables. They do not require the complete determination of the quantum state, which is regarded as a main advantage. On this paper it is experimentally analyzed an entanglement witness recently proposed in the context of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) experiments to test it in some Bell-diagonal states. We also propose some optimal entanglement witness for Bell-diagonal states. The efficiency of the two types of EW's are compared to a measure of entanglement with tomographic cost, the generalized robustness of entanglement. It is used a GRAPE algorithm to produce an entangled state which is out of the detection region of the EW for Bell-diagonal states. Upon relaxation, the results show that there is a region in which both EW fails, whereas the generalized robustness still shows entanglement, but with the entanglement witness proposed here with a better performance

Efficient UC Commitment Extension with Homomorphism for Free (and Applications)

Homomorphic universally composable (UC) commitments allow for the sender to reveal the result of additions and multiplications of values contained in commitments without revealing the values themselves while assuring the receiver of the correctness of such computation on committed values. In this work, we construct essentially optimal additively homomorphic UC commitments from any (not necessarily UC or homomorphic) extractable commitment. We obtain amortized linear computational complexity in the length of the input messages and rate 1. Next, we show how to extend our scheme to also obtain multiplicative homomorphism at the cost of asymptotic optimality but retaining low concrete complexity for practical parameters. While the previously best constructions use UC oblivious transfer as the main building block, our constructions only require extractable commitments and PRGs, achieving better concrete efficiency and offering new insights into the sufficient conditions for obtaining homomorphic UC commitments. Moreover, our techniques yield public coin protocols, which are compatible with the Fiat-Shamir heuristic. These results come at the cost of realizing a restricted version of the homomorphic commitment functionality where the sender is allowed to perform any number of commitments and operations on committed messages but is only allowed to perform a single batch opening of a number of commitments. Although this functionality seems restrictive, we show that it can be used as a building block for more efficient instantiations of recent protocols for secure multiparty computation and zero knowledge non-interactive arguments of knowledge

Aspectos funcionais e nutricionais do tomate: uso de agrotóxicos na tomaticultura de São José de Ubá (RJ).

bitstream/item/108098/1/2008-DOC-0095.pd

Geometrically induced singular behavior of entanglement

We show that the geometry of the set of quantum states plays a crucial role in the behavior of entanglement in different physical systems. More specifically it is shown that singular points at the border of the set of unentangled states appear as singularities in the dynamics of entanglement of smoothly varying quantum states. We illustrate this result by implementing a photonic parametric down conversion experiment. Moreover, this effect is connected to recently discovered singularities in condensed matter models.Comment: v2: 4 pags, 4 figs. A discussion before the proof of Proposition 1 and tomographic results were included, Propostion 2 was removed and the references were fixe