Separable states are more disordered globally than locally

A remarkable feature of quantum entanglement is that an entangled state of two parties, Alice (A) and Bob (B), may be more disordered locally than globally. That is, S(A) > S(A,B), where S(.) is the von Neumann entropy. It is known that satisfaction of this inequality implies that a state is non-separable. In this paper we prove the stronger result that for separable states the vector of eigenvalues of the density matrix of system AB is majorized by the vector of eigenvalues of the density matrix of system A alone. This gives a strong sense in which a separable state is more disordered globally than locally and a new necessary condition for separability of bipartite states in arbitrary dimensions. We also investigate the extent to which these conditions are sufficient to characterize separability, exhibiting examples that show separability cannot be characterized solely in terms of the local and global spectra of a state. We apply our conditions to give a simple proof that non-separable states exist sufficiently close to the completely mixed state of $n$ qudits.Comment: 4 page

Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation via Exchange interactions

Quantum computation can be performed by encoding logical qubits into the states of two or more physical qubits, and controlling a single effective exchange interaction and possibly a global magnetic field. This "encoded universality" paradigm offers potential simplifications in quantum computer design since it does away with the need to perform single-qubit rotations. Here we show that encoded universality schemes can be combined with quantum error correction. In particular, we show explicitly how to perform fault-tolerant leakage correction, thus overcoming the main obstacle to fault-tolerant encoded universality.Comment: 5 pages, including 1 figur

Bounds for mixing time of quantum walks on finite graphs

Several inequalities are proved for the mixing time of discrete-time quantum walks on finite graphs. The mixing time is defined differently than in Aharonov, Ambainis, Kempe and Vazirani (2001) and it is found that for particular examples of walks on a cycle, a hypercube and a complete graph, quantum walks provide no speed-up in mixing over the classical counterparts. In addition, non-unitary quantum walks (i.e., walks with decoherence) are considered and a criterion for their convergence to the unique stationary distribution is derived.Comment: This is the journal version (except formatting); it is a significant revision of the previous version, in particular, it contains a new result about the convergence of quantum walks with decoherence; 16 page

Irreversibility of entanglement loss

The action of a channel on a quantum system, when non trivial, always causes deterioration of initial quantum resources, understood as the entanglement initially shared by the input system with some reference purifying it. One effective way to measure such a deterioration is by measuring the loss of coherent information, namely the difference between the initial coherent information and the final one: such a difference is ``small'', if and only if the action of the channel can be ``almost perfectly'' corrected with probability one. In this work, we generalise this result to different entanglement loss functions, notably including the entanglement of formation loss, and prove that many inequivalent entanglement measures lead to equivalent conditions for approximate quantum error correction. In doing this, we show how different measures of bipartite entanglement give rise to corresponding distance-like functions between quantum channels, and we investigate how these induced distances are related to the cb-norm.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, llncs.sty; contribution to the proceedings of TQC2008, Tokyo. Few typos corrected. To appear in: [Y. Kawano and M. Mosca (eds.): TQC 2008, LNCS 5106, pp.16-28, 2008

Riverine transfer of heavy metals from Patagonia to the southwestern Atlantic Ocean

The occurrence and geochemical behaviour of Fe, Mn, Pb, Cu, Ni, Cr, Zn and Co are studied in riverine detrital materials transported by Patagonian rivers. Their riverine inputs have been estimated and the nature of these inputs to the Atlantic Ocean is discussed. Most of the metals are transported to the ocean via the suspended load; there is evidence that Fe oxides and organic matter are important phases controlling their distribution in the detrital non-residual fraction. Most heavy metal concentrations found in bed sediments, in suspended matter, and in the dissolved load of Patagonian rivers were comparable to those reported for non-polluted rivers. There is indication that human activity is altering riverine metal inputs to the ocean. In the northern basins – and indicatinganthropogenic effects – heavy metals distribution in the suspended load is very different from that found in bed sediments. The use of pesticides in the Negro River valley seems correlated with increased riverine input of Cu, mostly bound to the suspended load. The Deseado and Chico Rivers exhibit increased specific yield of metals as a consequence of extended erosion within their respective basins. The Santa Cruz is the drainage basin least affected by human activity and its metal-exporting capacity should be taken as an example of a relatively unaffected large hydrological system. In contrast, coal mining modifies the transport pattern of heavy metals in the Gallegos River, inasmuch as they are exported to the coastal zone mainly as dissolved load

Exact Solutions for the Incompressible Electrically Conducting Viscous Flow between Two Moving Parallel Disks in Unsteady Magneto Hydrodynamic and Stability Analysis

The main interest of the present investigation is to generate exact solutions to the steady Navier-Stokes equations for the incompressible Newtonian viscous electrically conducting fluid flow motion and stability due to disks moving towards each other or in opposite directions with a constant velocity. Making use of the analytic solution, the description of possible conditions of motion is based on the exact solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations. Both stationary and transient cases have been considered. The stability of motion is analyzed for different initial perturbations. Different types of stability were found according to whether the disks moved towards or away from each other

Fast Universal Quantum Computation with Railroad-switch Local Hamiltonians

We present two universal models of quantum computation with a time-independent, frustration-free Hamiltonian. The first construction uses 3-local (qubit) projectors, and the second one requires only 2-local qubit-qutrit projectors. We build on Feynman's Hamiltonian computer idea and use a railroad-switch type clock register. The resources required to simulate a quantum circuit with L gates in this model are O(L) small-dimensional quantum systems (qubits or qutrits), a time-independent Hamiltonian composed of O(L) local, constant norm, projector terms, the possibility to prepare computational basis product states, a running time O(L log^2 L), and the possibility to measure a few qubits in the computational basis. Our models also give a simplified proof of the universality of 3-local Adiabatic Quantum Computation.Comment: Added references to work by de Falco et al., and realized that Feynman's '85 paper already contained the idea of a switch in i

Universal 2-local Hamiltonian Quantum Computing

We present a Hamiltonian quantum computation scheme universal for quantum computation (BQP). Our Hamiltonian is a sum of a polynomial number (in the number of gates L in the quantum circuit) of time-independent, constant-norm, 2-local qubit-qubit interaction terms. Furthermore, each qubit in the system interacts only with a constant number of other qubits. The computer runs in three steps - starts in a simple initial product-state, evolves it for time of order L^2 (up to logarithmic factors) and wraps up with a two-qubit measurement. Our model differs from the previous universal 2-local Hamiltonian constructions in that it does not use perturbation gadgets, does not need large energy penalties in the Hamiltonian and does not need to run slowly to ensure adiabatic evolution.Comment: recomputed the necessary number of interactions, new geometric layout, added reference