A casemix analysis of hospital admissions in six specialties for Barking & Havering Health Authority.

To examine admission rates for Barking & Havering residents to six surgical specialties by first looking at elective, emergency and total workloads, then at the casemix of elective work using Healthcare Resource Groups. To compare findings to other London areas

Simple conditions for convergence of sequential Monte Carlo genealogies with applications

We present simple conditions under which the limiting genealogical process associated with a class of interacting particle systems with non-neutral selection mechanisms, as the number of particles grows, is a time-rescaled Kingman coalescent. Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms are popular methods for approximating integrals in problems such as non-linear filtering and smoothing which employ this type of particle system. Their performance depends strongly on the properties of the induced genealogical process. We verify the conditions of our main result for standard sequential Monte Carlo algorithms with a broad class of low-variance resampling schemes, as well as for conditional sequential Monte Carlo with multinomial resampling.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figur

Ytterbium nuclear-spin qubits in an optical tweezer array

We report on the realization of a fast, scalable, and high-fidelity qubit architecture, based on $^{171}$Yb atoms in an optical tweezer array. We demonstrate several attractive properties of this atom for its use as a building block of a quantum information processing platform. Its nuclear spin of 1/2 serves as a long-lived and coherent two-level system, while its rich, alkaline-earth-like electronic structure allows for low-entropy preparation, fast qubit control, and high-fidelity readout. We present a near-deterministic loading protocol, which allows us to fill a 10$\times$10 tweezer array with 92.73(8)% efficiency and a single tweezer with 96.0(1.4)% efficiency. In the future, this loading protocol will enable efficient and uniform loading of target arrays with high probability, an essential step in quantum simulation and information applications. Employing a robust optical approach, we perform submicrosecond qubit rotations and characterize their fidelity through randomized benchmarking, yielding 5.2(5)$\times 10^{-3}$ error per Clifford gate. For quantum memory applications, we measure the coherence of our qubits with $T_2^*$=3.7(4) s and $T_2$=7.9(4) s, many orders of magnitude longer than our qubit rotation pulses. We measure spin depolarization times on the order of tens of seconds and find that this can be increased to the 100 s scale through the application of a several-gauss magnetic field. Finally, we use 3D Raman-sideband cooling to bring the atoms near their motional ground state, which will be central to future implementations of two-qubit gates that benefit from low motional entropy.Comment: Fixed typos, refined scattering model, adds T1 dat

Patterns of Vertebrate Diversity and Protection in Brazil

Most conservation decisions take place at national or finer spatial scales. Providing useful information at such decision-making scales is essential for guiding the practice of conservation. Brazil is one of the world’s megadiverse countries, and consequently decisions about conservation in the country have a disproportionate impact on the survival of global biodiversity. For three groups of terrestrial vertebrates (birds, mammals, and amphibians), we examined geographic patterns of diversity and protection in Brazil, including that of endemic, small-ranged, and threatened species. To understand potential limitations of the data, we also explored how spatial bias in collection localities may influence the perceived patterns of diversity. The highest overall species richness is in the Amazon and Atlantic Forests, while the Atlantic Forest dominates in terms of country endemics and small-ranged species. Globally threatened species do not present a consistent pattern. Patterns for birds were similar to overall species richness, with higher concentrations of threatened species in the Atlantic Forest, while mammals show a more generalized pattern across the country and a high concentration in the Amazon. Few amphibians are listed as threatened, mostly in the Atlantic Forest. Data deficient mammals occur across the country, concentrating in the Amazon and southeast Atlantic Forest, and there are no data deficient birds in Brazil. In contrast, nearly a third of amphibians are data deficient, widespread across the country, but with a high concentration in the far southeast. Spatial biases in species locality data, however, possibly influence the perceived patterns of biodiversity. Regions with low sampling density need more biological studies, as do the many data deficient species. All biomes except the Amazon have less than 3% of their area under full protection. Reassuringly though, rates of protection do correlate with higher biodiversity, including higher levels of threatened and small-ranged species. Our results indicate a need for expanded formal protection in Brazil, especially in the Atlantic forest, and with an emphasis on fully protected areas

Quenched Chiral Perturbation Theory for Vector Mesons

We develop quenched chiral perturbation theory for vector mesons made of light quarks, in the limit where the vector meson masses are much larger than the pion mass. We use this theory to extract the leading nonanalytic dependence of the vector meson masses on the masses of the light quarks. By comparing with analogous quantities computed in ordinary chiral perturbation theory, we estimate the size of quenching effects, observing that in general they can be quite large. This estimate is relevant to lattice simulations, where the $\rho$ mass is often used to set the lattice spacing.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, uses REVTeX and epsf.st

Mid-circuit operations using the omg-architecture in neutral atom arrays

We implement mid-circuit operations in a 48-site array of neutral atoms, enabled by new methods for control of the $\textit{omg}$ (optical-metastable-ground state qubit) architecture present in ${}^{171}$Yb. We demonstrate laser-based control of ground, metastable and optical qubits with average single-qubit fidelities of $F_{g} = 99.968(3)$, $F_{m} = 99.12(4)$ and $F_{o} = 99.804(8)$. With state-sensitive shelving between the ground and metastable states, we realize a non-destructive state-detection for $^{171}$Yb, and reinitialize in the ground state with either global control or local feed-forward operations. We use local addressing of the optical clock transition to perform mid-circuit operations, including measurement, spin reset, and motional reset in the form of ground-state cooling. In characterizing mid-circuit measurement on ground-state qubits, we observe raw errors of $1.8(6)\%$ on ancilla qubits and $4.5(1.0)\%$ on data qubits, with the former (latter) uncorrected for $1.0(2)\%$ ($2.0(2)\%$) preparation and measurement error; we observe similar performance for mid-circuit reset operations. The reported realization of the $\textit{omg}$ architecture and mid-circuit operations are door-opening for many tasks in quantum information science, including quantum error-correction, entanglement generation, and metrology

Physical Conditions in Shocked Interstellar Gas Interacting with the Supernova Remnant IC 443

We present the results of a detailed investigation into the physical conditions in interstellar material interacting with the supernova remnant IC 443. Our analysis is based on a comprehensive examination of high-resolution far-ultraviolet spectra obtained with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph onboard the Hubble Space Telescope of two stars behind IC 443. One of our targets (HD 43582) probes gas along the entire line of sight through the supernova remnant, while the other (HD 254755) samples material located ahead of the primary supernova shock front. We identify low velocity quiescent gas in both directions and find that the densities and temperatures in these components are typical of diffuse atomic and molecular clouds. Numerous high velocity components are observed in the absorption profiles of neutral and singly-ionized atomic species toward HD 43582. These components exhibit a combination of greatly enhanced thermal pressures and significantly reduced dust-grain depletions. We interpret this material as cooling gas in a recombination zone far downstream from shocks driven into neutral gas clumps. The pressures derived for a group of ionized gas components at high positive velocity toward HD 43582 are lower than those of the other shocked components, pointing to pressure inhomogeneities across the remnant. A strong very high velocity component near -620 km/s is seen in the absorption profiles of highly-ionized species toward HD 43582. The velocity of this material is consistent with the range of shock velocities implied by observations of soft thermal X-ray emission from IC 443. Moderately high-velocity gas toward HD 254755 may represent shocked material from a separate foreground supernova remnant.Comment: 88 pages, 27 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Supramolecular self-assembled network formation containing N···Br halogen bonds in physisorbed overlayers.

The formation of a halogen bonded self-assembled co-crystal physisorbed monolayer containing N···Br interactions is reported for the first time. The co-crystal monolayer is identified experimentally by synchrotron X-ray diffraction and the structure determined. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations are also employed to assess the magnitudes of the different interactions in the layer. Significantly, compared to other halogen bonds in physisorbed monolayers we have reported recently, the N···Br bond here is found to be non-linear. It is proposed that the increasing importance of the lateral hydrogen bond interactions, relative to the halogen bond strength, leads to the bending of the halogen bonds.We acknowledge financial support for AB from EPSRC DTA award from the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge. We acknowledge Diamond Light Source for time on beamline I11 under proposals EE6511 and EE7761.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from the Royal Society of Chemistry via http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C4CP03379

Plasmodium falciparum: linkage disequilibrium between loci in chromosomes 7 and 5 and chloroquine selective pressure in Northern Nigeria.

In view of the recent discovery (Molecular Cell 6, 861-871) of a (Lys76Thr) codon change in gene pfcrt on chromosome 7 which determines in vitro chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium falciparum, we have re-examined samples taken before treatment in our study in Zaria, Northern Nigeria (Parasitology, 119, 343-348). Drug resistance was present in 5/5 cases where the pfcrt 76Thr codon change was seen (100% positive predictive value). Drug sensitivity was found in 26/28 cases where the change was absent (93% negative predictive value). Allele pfcrt 76Thr showed strong linkage disequilibrium with pfmdr1 Tyr86 on chromosome 5, more complete than that between pfcrt and cg2 alleles situated between recombination cross-over points on chromosome 7. Physical linkage of cg2 with pfcrt may account for linkage disequilibrium between their alleles but in the case of genes pfmdr1 and pfcrt, on different chromosomes, it is likely that this is maintained epistatically through the selective pressure of chloroquine