AND Protocols Using Only Uniform Shuffles

Secure multi-party computation using a deck of playing cards has been a subject of research since the "five-card trick" introduced by den Boer in 1989. One of the main problems in card-based cryptography is to design committed-format protocols to compute a Boolean AND operation subject to different runtime and shuffle restrictions by using as few cards as possible. In this paper, we introduce two AND protocols that use only uniform shuffles. The first one requires four cards and is a restart-free Las Vegas protocol with finite expected runtime. The second one requires five cards and always terminates in finite time.Comment: This paper has appeared at CSR 201

Equal-Spin Andreev Reflection in Junctions of Spin-Resolved Quantum Hall Bulk State and Spin-Singlet Superconductor

The recent development of superconducting spintronics has revealed the spin-triplet superconducting proximity effect from a spin-singlet superconductor into a spin-polarized normal metal. In addition recently superconducting junctions using semiconductors are in demand for highly controlled experiments to engineer topological superconductivity. Here we report experimental observation of Andreev reflection in junctions of spin-resolved quantum Hall (QH) states in an InAs quantum well and the spin-singlet superconductor NbTi. The measured conductance indicates a sub-gap feature and two peaks on the outer side of the sub-gap feature in the QH plateau-transition regime increases. The observed structures can be explained by considering transport with Andreev reflection from two channels, one originating from equal-spin Andreev reflection intermediated by spin-flip processes and second arising from normal Andreev reflection. This result indicates the possibility to induce the superconducting proximity gap in the the QH bulk state, and the possibility for the development of superconducting spintronics in semiconductor devices

Mott gap excitations in twin-free YBa2Cu3O7-d (Tc = 93 K) studied by RIXS

Mott gap excitations in the high-Tc superconductor of the optimal doped YBa2Cu3O7-d (Tc = 93 K) have been studied by the resonant inelastic x-ray scattering method. Anisotropic spectra in the ab-plane are observed in a twin-free crystal. The excitation from the one-dimensional CuO chain is enhanced at 2 eV near the zone boundary of the b* direction, while the excitation from the CuO2 plane is broad at 1.5-4 eV and almost independent of the momentum transfer. Theoretical calculation based on the one-dimensional and two-dimensional Hubbard model reproduces the observed spectra by taking the different parameters of the on-site Coulomb energy. The fact of the Mott gap of the CuO chain site is much smaller than that of CuO2 plane site is observed for the first time

Card-Based Cryptography Meets Formal Verification

Card-based cryptography provides simple and practicable protocols for performing secure multi-party computation (MPC) with just a deck of cards. For the sake of simplicity, this is often done using cards with only two symbols, e.g., ♣ and ♡. Within this paper, we target the setting where all cards carry distinct symbols, catering for use-cases with commonly available standard decks and a weaker indistinguishability assumption. As of yet, the literature provides for only three protocols and no proofs for non-trivial lower bounds on the number of cards. As such complex proofs (handling very large combinatorial state spaces) tend to be involved and error-prone, we propose using formal verification for finding protocols and proving lower bounds. In this paper, we employ the technique of software bounded model checking (SBMC), which reduces the problem to a bounded state space, which is automatically searched exhaustively using a SAT solver as a backend. Our contribution is twofold: (a) We identify two protocols for converting between different bit encodings with overlapping bases, and then show them to be card-minimal. This completes the picture of tight lower bounds on the number of cards with respect to runtime behavior and shuffle properties of conversion protocols. For computing AND, we show that there is no protocol with finite runtime using four cards with distinguishable symbols and fixed output encoding, and give a four-card protocol with an expected finite runtime using only random cuts. (b) We provide a general translation of proofs for lower bounds to a bounded model checking framework for automatically finding card- and length-minimal protocols and to give additional confidence in lower bounds. We apply this to validate our method and, as an example, confirm our new AND protocol to have a shortest run for protocols using this number of cards

Charge excitations associated with charge stripe order in the 214-type nickelate and superconducting cuprate

Charge excitations were studied for stipe-ordered 214 compounds, La$_{5/3}$Sr$_{1/3}$NiO$_{4}$ and 1/8-doped La$_{2}$(Ba, Sr)$_{x}$CuO$_{4}$ using resonant inelastic x-ray scattering in hard x-ray regime. We have observed charge excitations at the energy transfer of 1 eV with the momentum transfer corresponding to the charge stripe spatial period both for the diagonal (nikelate) and parallel (cuprates) stripes. These new excitations can be interpreted as a collective stripe excitation or charge excitonic mode to a stripe-related in-gap state.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Momentum Dependence of Charge Excitations in the Electron-Doped Superconductor Nd1.85Ce0.15CuO4: a RIXS Study

We report a resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) study of charge excitations in the electron-doped high-Tc superconductor Nd1.85Ce0.15CuO4. The intraband and interband excitations across the Fermi energy are separated for the first time by tuning the experimental conditions properly to measure charge excitations at low energy. A dispersion relation with q-dependent width emerges clearly in the intraband excitation, while the intensity of the interband excitation is concentrated around 2 eV near the zone center. The experimental results are consistent with theoretical calculation of the RIXS spectra based on the Hubbard model