9,107 research outputs found
No Escape
The initial idea for the film came from an inspiring performance of Chaplin's Easy Street (1917) accompanied by Donald MacKenzie, resident organist at the Odeon Leicester Square, which led me into researches of early cinema (c1895-1907), a period described by Tom Gunning as the ‘cinema of attractions’. James Lastra points out that during this time competition between cinemas was based on the success of various sound strategies all emphasising the ‘liveness’ of the film experience and films were made to motivate particular types of sound accompaniment.
Particularly intriguing was the use of live sound effects performed by a skilled troupe from behind the film screen to produce ‘realistic’ sound effects. This is translated in No Escape into the manipulation of on-screen diegetic sound, also inspired by Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète and his notions of the sound object and reduced listening. The interaction between the live piano and the onscreen sound is crucial to No Escape as is that of the piano and images, which exist alone together for long stretches.
The visual content and structure of the film draws on the city symphonies of Walter Ruttman and especially Dziga Vertov whose formal experimentation, startling juxtaposition of images and very rapid editing is important to No Escape’s non-narrative and at times complex montage of British rural and urban vistas. Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is by and partially about the man with the camera as is No Escape, the title of which refers to the idea that though we may travel to get away from something, there is no escape from the inner life. This is represented by the piano music, which varies but within fairly restricted limits. It does respond or drive image choice and editing but the overall sense should be that one cannot escape and these responses are temporary and fleeting
Extrapolating from Tom Gunning's cinema of attractions, James Beattie's concept of ‘documentary display’ - a poetic, sensual and subjective approach which encourages listening and looking rather than cognitive understanding - underpins the aesthetic of No Escape, as is a belief in the supremacy of sound and of film as a performative event
Non Abelian structures and the geometric phase of entangled qudits
In this work, we address some important topological and algebraic aspects of
two-qudit states evolving under local unitary operations. The projective
invariant subspaces and evolutions are connected with the common elements
characterizing the su(d) Lie algebra and their representations. In particular,
the roots and weights turn out to be natural quantities to parametrize cyclic
evolutions and fractional phases. This framework is then used to recast the
coset contribution to the geometric phase in a form that generalizes the usual
monopole-like formula for a single qubit.Comment: 22 pages, LaTe
Non-Gaussianities in New Ekpyrotic Cosmology
New Ekpyrotic Cosmology is an alternative scenario of the early universe
which relies on a phase of slow contraction before the big bang. We calculate
the 3-point and 4-point correlation functions of primordial density
perturbations and find a generically large non-Gaussian signal, just below the
current sensitivity level of CMB experiments. This is in contrast with
slow-roll inflation, which predicts negligible non-Gaussianity. The model is
also distinguishable from alternative inflationary scenarios that yield large
non-Gaussianity, such as DBI inflation and the simplest curvaton-like models,
through the shape dependence of the correlation functions. Non-Gaussianity
therefore provides a distinguishing and testable prediction of New Ekpyrotic
Cosmology.Comment: 4 pages. v2: sign convention clarified, references added; v3: minor
changes, version to appear in PR
Fractional topological phase for entangled qudits
We investigate the topological structure of entangled qudits under unitary
local operations. Different sectors are identified in the evolution, and their
geometrical and topological aspects are analyzed. The geometric phase is
explicitly calculated in terms of the concurrence. As a main result, we predict
a fractional topological phase for cyclic evolutions in the multiply connected
space of maximally entangled states.Comment: REVTex, 4 page
Quantum phase-space analysis of the pendular cavity
We perform a quantum mechanical analysis of the pendular cavity, using the
positive-P representation, showing that the quantum state of the moving mirror,
a macroscopic object, has noticeable effects on the dynamics. This system has
previously been proposed as a candidate for the quantum-limited measurement of
small displacements of the mirror due to radiation pressure, for the production
of states with entanglement between the mirror and the field, and even for
superposition states of the mirror. However, when we treat the oscillating
mirror quantum mechanically, we find that it always oscillates, has no
stationary steady-state, and exhibits uncertainties in position and momentum
which are typically larger than the mean values. This means that previous
linearised fluctuation analyses which have been used to predict these highly
quantum states are of limited use. We find that the achievable accuracy in
measurement is far worse than the standard quantum limit due to thermal noise,
which, for typical experimental parameters, is overwhelming even at 2 mK.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures To be published in Phys. Rev.
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