204 research outputs found
Is thirty-seven years sufficient for full return of the ant biota following restoration?
Introduction: An assessment of whether rehabilitated mine sites have resulted in natural or novel ecosystems requires monitoring over considerable periods of time or the use of space-for-time substitution (chronosequence) approaches. Methods: To provide an assessment of ecosystem recovery in areas mined for bauxite in 1975, the ant fauna of one area planted with Eucalyptus resinifera, one seeded with mixed native species, one topsoiled but unrestored, and a forest reference was subjected to a ‘long-term’ study by sampling monthly and latterly annually between 1976 and 1989 using pitfall traps. These plots were resampled in 2012. A companion ‘short-term’ chronosequence study was performed in 1979 in 28 bauxite mines of various ages and restored by a range of different methods, plus three forest references. In order to examine the assertion that the observed differences between restored areas and forest references will lessen with time, sampling using comparable methods was repeated in 2012 in seven of the original plots, representing progressive advances in rehabilitation technology: planted pines; planted eastern states eucalypts; planted native eucalypts; planted eucalypts over seeded understorey; and planted eucalypts on fresh, double-stripped topsoil, plus two forest reference sites. Results: Ant and other invertebrate richness in the long-term study was initially superior in the seeded plot, with little difference between the planted and unplanted plots. It was concluded that although composition of the ant fauna had converged on that of the forest over the 14-year period, differences still persisted.The 2012 resampling revealed that ant species richness and composition had deteriorated in the seeded plot, while values in the unplanted plot, which now supported naturally colonised trees and an understorey, had increased. Differences between all rehabilitated plots and forest still persisted. As with the long-term study, the rate of fauna return and the type of ants present in the short-term study plots differed with the method of rehabilitation used, and, in 1979, no plots had converged on the forest in terms of the ant assemblage. By 2012 ant richness increased, and more so with each advance in rehabilitation technology, except for seeding, in which the understorey had collapsed. Double-stripping of topsoil resulted in the greatest improvements in ant species richness, although none of the areas had converged on the forest reference areas in terms of assemblage composition or ant functional group profiles. Furthermore, assemblage composition in the forest had changed over time, possibly due to reductions in rainfall, which further complicates rehabilitation objectives. Conclusions: It is concluded that although rehabilitation can achieve its objective of restoring diversity, the original assemblage has still not been achieved after 37 years, suggesting that a degree of novelty has been introduced into these older-style rehabilitated areas. The company’s current rehabilitation practices reflect multiple advances in their approach, lending optimism that current restoration may achieve something close to the original ecosystem, an outcome that can only be verified by extended studies like the one described here
Microcavity controlled coupling of excitonic qubits
Controlled non-local energy and coherence transfer enables light harvesting
in photosynthesis and non-local logical operations in quantum computing. The
most relevant mechanism of coherent coupling of distant qubits is coupling via
the electromagnetic field. Here, we demonstrate the controlled coherent
coupling of spatially separated excitonic qubits via the photon mode of a solid
state microresonator. This is revealed by two-dimensional spectroscopy of the
sample's coherent response, a sensitive and selective probe of the coherent
coupling. The experimental results are quantitatively described by a rigorous
theory of the cavity mediated coupling within a cluster of quantum dots
excitons. Having demonstrated this mechanism, it can be used in extended
coupling channels - sculptured, for instance, in photonic crystal cavities - to
enable a long-range, non-local wiring up of individual emitters in solids
Implementation of a Toffoli Gate with Superconducting Circuits
The quantum Toffoli gate allows universal reversible classical computation.
It is also an important primitive in many quantum circuits and quantum error
correction schemes. Here we demonstrate the realization of a Toffoli gate with
three superconducting transmon qubits coupled to a microwave resonator. By
exploiting the third energy level of the transmon qubit, the number of
elementary gates needed for the implementation of the Toffoli gate, as well as
the total gate time can be reduced significantly in comparison to theoretical
proposals using two-level systems only. We characterize the performance of the
gate by full process tomography and Monte Carlo process certification. The gate
fidelity is found to be %.Comment: 4 pages, 5figure
Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics: Coherent Coupling of a Single Photon to a Cooper Pair Box
Under appropriate conditions, superconducting electronic circuits behave
quantum mechanically, with properties that can be designed and controlled at
will. We have realized an experiment in which a superconducting two-level
system, playing the role of an artificial atom, is strongly coupled to a single
photon stored in an on-chip cavity. We show that the atom-photon coupling in
this circuit can be made strong enough for coherent effects to dominate over
dissipation, even in a solid state environment. This new regime of matter light
interaction in a circuit can be exploited for quantum information processing
and quantum communication. It may also lead to new approaches for single photon
generation and detection.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Nature, embargo does
apply, version with high resolution figures available at:
http://www.eng.yale.edu/rslab/Andreas/content/science/PubsPapers.htm
Preparation and Measurement of Three-Qubit Entanglement in a Superconducting Circuit
Traditionally, quantum entanglement has played a central role in foundational
discussions of quantum mechanics. The measurement of correlations between
entangled particles can exhibit results at odds with classical behavior. These
discrepancies increase exponentially with the number of entangled particles.
When entanglement is extended from just two quantum bits (qubits) to three, the
incompatibilities between classical and quantum correlation properties can
change from a violation of inequalities involving statistical averages to sign
differences in deterministic observations. With the ample confirmation of
quantum mechanical predictions by experiments, entanglement has evolved from a
philosophical conundrum to a key resource for quantum-based technologies, like
quantum cryptography and computation. In particular, maximal entanglement of
more than two qubits is crucial to the implementation of quantum error
correction protocols. While entanglement of up to 3, 5, and 8 qubits has been
demonstrated among spins, photons, and ions, respectively, entanglement in
engineered solid-state systems has been limited to two qubits. Here, we
demonstrate three-qubit entanglement in a superconducting circuit, creating
Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states with fidelity of 88%, measured with
quantum state tomography. Several entanglement witnesses show violation of
bi-separable bounds by 830\pm80%. Our entangling sequence realizes the first
step of basic quantum error correction, namely the encoding of a logical qubit
into a manifold of GHZ-like states using a repetition code. The integration of
encoding, decoding and error-correcting steps in a feedback loop will be the
next milestone for quantum computing with integrated circuits.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, and Supplementary Information (4 figures)
Resolving photon number states in a superconducting circuit
Electromagnetic signals are always composed of photons, though in the circuit
domain those signals are carried as voltages and currents on wires, and the
discreteness of the photon's energy is usually not evident. However, by
coupling a superconducting qubit to signals on a microwave transmission line,
it is possible to construct an integrated circuit where the presence or absence
of even a single photon can have a dramatic effect. This system is called
circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) because it is the circuit equivalent of
the atom-photon interaction in cavity QED. Previously, circuit QED devices were
shown to reach the resonant strong coupling regime, where a single qubit can
absorb and re-emit a single photon many times. Here, we report a circuit QED
experiment which achieves the strong dispersive limit, a new regime of cavity
QED in which a single photon has a large effect on the qubit or atom without
ever being absorbed. The hallmark of this strong dispersive regime is that the
qubit transition can be resolved into a separate spectral line for each photon
number state of the microwave field. The strength of each line is a measure of
the probability to find the corresponding photon number in the cavity. This
effect has been used to distinguish between coherent and thermal fields and
could be used to create a photon statistics analyzer. Since no photons are
absorbed by this process, one should be able to generate non-classical states
of light by measurement and perform qubit-photon conditional logic, the basis
of a logic bus for a quantum computer.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, hi-res version at
http://www.eng.yale.edu/rslab/papers/numbersplitting_hires.pd
Topologically Protected Quantum State Transfer in a Chiral Spin Liquid
Topology plays a central role in ensuring the robustness of a wide variety of
physical phenomena. Notable examples range from the robust current carrying
edge states associated with the quantum Hall and the quantum spin Hall effects
to proposals involving topologically protected quantum memory and quantum logic
operations. Here, we propose and analyze a topologically protected channel for
the transfer of quantum states between remote quantum nodes. In our approach,
state transfer is mediated by the edge mode of a chiral spin liquid. We
demonstrate that the proposed method is intrinsically robust to realistic
imperfections associated with disorder and decoherence. Possible experimental
implementations and applications to the detection and characterization of spin
liquid phases are discussed.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure
Demonstration of Two-Qubit Algorithms with a Superconducting Quantum Processor
By harnessing the superposition and entanglement of physical states, quantum
computers could outperform their classical counterparts in solving problems of
technological impact, such as factoring large numbers and searching databases.
A quantum processor executes algorithms by applying a programmable sequence of
gates to an initialized register of qubits, which coherently evolves into a
final state containing the result of the computation. Simultaneously meeting
the conflicting requirements of long coherence, state preparation, universal
gate operations, and qubit readout makes building quantum processors
challenging. Few-qubit processors have already been shown in nuclear magnetic
resonance, cold ion trap and optical systems, but a solid-state realization has
remained an outstanding challenge. Here we demonstrate a two-qubit
superconducting processor and the implementation of the Grover search and
Deutsch-Jozsa quantum algorithms. We employ a novel two-qubit interaction,
tunable in strength by two orders of magnitude on nanosecond time scales, which
is mediated by a cavity bus in a circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED)
architecture. This interaction allows generation of highly-entangled states
with concurrence up to 94%. Although this processor constitutes an important
step in quantum computing with integrated circuits, continuing efforts to
increase qubit coherence times, gate performance and register size will be
required to fulfill the promise of a scalable technology.Comment: 6 pages, 1 table, 4 figures, and Supplementary Information (3 pages,
3 figures); Expanded author list, updated references, and minor improvements
to text and figure
Dynamics of the Leaf-Litter Arthropod Fauna Following Fire in a Neotropical Woodland Savanna
Fire is an important agent of disturbance in tropical savannas, but relatively few studies have analyzed how soil-and-litter dwelling arthropods respond to fire disturbance despite the critical role these organisms play in nutrient cycling and other biogeochemical processes. Following the incursion of a fire into a woodland savanna ecological reserve in Central Brazil, we monitored the dynamics of litter-arthropod populations for nearly two years in one burned and one unburned area of the reserve. We also performed a reciprocal transplant experiment to determine the effects of fire and litter type on the dynamics of litter colonization by arthropods. Overall arthropod abundance, the abundance of individual taxa, the richness of taxonomic groups, and the species richness of individual taxa (Formiciade) were lower in the burned site. However, both the ordinal-level composition of the litter arthropod fauna and the species-level composition of the litter ant fauna were not dramatically different in the burned and unburned sites. There is evidence that seasonality of rainfall interacts with fire, as differences in arthropod abundance and diversity were more pronounced in the dry than in the wet season. For many taxa the differences in abundance between burned and unburned sites were maintained even when controlling for litter availability and quality. In contrast, differences in abundance for Collembola, Formicidae, and Thysanoptera were only detected in the unmanipulated samples, which had a lower amount of litter in the burned than in the unburned site throughout most of our study period. Together these results suggest that arthropod density declines in fire-disturbed areas as a result of direct mortality, diminished resources (i.e., reduced litter cover) and less favorable microclimate (i.e., increased litter desiccation due to reduction in tree cover). Although these effects were transitory, there is evidence that the increasingly prevalent fire return interval of only 1–2 years may jeopardize the long-term conservation of litter arthropod communities
Neurodegenerative Properties of Chronic Pain: Cognitive Decline in Patients with Chronic Pancreatitis
Chronic pain has been associated with impaired cognitive function. We examined cognitive performance in patients with severe chronic pancreatitis pain. We explored the following factors for their contribution to observed cognitive deficits: pain duration, comorbidity (depression, sleep disturbance), use of opioids, and premorbid alcohol abuse. The cognitive profiles of 16 patients with severe pain due to chronic pancreatitis were determined using an extensive neuropsychological test battery. Data from three cognitive domains (psychomotor performance, memory, executive functions) were compared to data from healthy controls matched for age, gender and education. Multivariate multilevel analysis of the data showed decreased test scores in patients with chronic pancreatitis pain in different cognitive domains. Psychomotor performance and executive functions showed the most prominent decline. Interestingly, pain duration appeared to be the strongest predictor for observed cognitive decline. Depressive symptoms, sleep disturbance, opioid use and history of alcohol abuse provided additional explanations for the observed cognitive decline in some of the tests, but to a lesser extent than pain duration. The negative effect of pain duration on cognitive performance is compatible with the theory of neurodegenerative properties of chronic pain. Therefore, early and effective therapeutic interventions might reduce or prevent decline in cognitive performance, thereby improving outcomes and quality of life in these patients
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