Photon and electron spectra in hot and dense QED

Photon and electron spectra in hot and dense QED are found in the high temperature limit for all |\q| using the Feynman gauge and the one-loop self-energy. All spectra are split by the medium and their branches develop the gap (the dynamical mass) at zero momentum. The photon spectrum has two branches (longitudinal and transverse) with the common mass; but electron spectrum is split on four branches which are well-separated for any |\q| including their |\q|=0 limits (their effective masses). These masses and the photon thermal mass are calculated explicitly and the different limits of spectrum branches are established in detail. The gauge invariance of the high-temperature spectra is briefly discussed.Comment: 9 pages, latex, no figure

Multiexcitons confined within a sub-excitonic volume: Spectroscopic and dynamical signatures of neutral and charged biexcitons in ultrasmall semiconductor nanocrystals

The use of ultrafast gating techniques allows us to resolve both spectrally and temporally the emission from short-lived neutral and negatively charged biexcitons in ultrasmall (sub-10 nm) CdSe nanocrystals (nanocrystal quantum dots). Because of forced overlap of electronic wave functions and reduced dielectric screening, these states are characterized by giant interaction energies of tens (neutral biexcitons) to hundreds (charged biexcitons) of meV. Both types of biexcitons show extremely short lifetimes (from sub-100 picoseconds to sub-picosecond time scales) that rapidly shorten with decreasing nanocrystal size. These ultrafast relaxation dynamics are explained in terms of highly efficient nonradiative Auger recombination.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Optimal quantum state reconstruction for cold trapped ions

We study the physical implementation of an optimal tomographic reconstruction scheme for the case of determining the state of a multi-qubit system, where trapped ions are used for defining qubits. The protocol is based on the use of mutually unbiased measurements and on the physical information described in H. H\"{a}ffner \emph{et. al} [Nature \textbf{438}, 643-646 (2005)]. We introduce the concept of physical complexity for different types of unbiased measurements and analyze their generation in terms of one and two qubit gates for trapped ions.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. A as Rap. Com

Quadrupole transitions near interface: general theory and application to atom inside a planar cavity

Quadrupole radiation of an atom in an arbitrary environment is investigated within classical as well as quantum electrodynamical approaches. Analytical expressions for decay rates are obtained in terms of Green function of Maxwell equations. The equivalence of both approaches is shown. General expressions are applied to analyze the quadrupole decay rate of an atom placed between two half spaces with arbitrary dielectric constant. It is shown that in the case when the atom is close to the surface, the total decay rate is inversely proportional to the fifth power of distance between an atom and a plane interface.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure

One-particle and collective electron spectra in hot and dense QED and their gauge dependence

The one-particle electron spectrum is found for hot and dense QED and its properties are investigated in comparison with the collective spectrum. It is shown that the one-particle spectrum (in any case its zero momentum limit) is gauge invariant, but the collective spectrum, being qualitatively different, is always gauge dependent. The exception is the case $m,\mu=0$ for which the collective spectrum long wavelength limit demonstrates the gauge invariance as well.Comment: 9 pages, latex, no figure

MV3: A new word based stream cipher using rapid mixing and revolving buffers

MV3 is a new word based stream cipher for encrypting long streams of data. A direct adaptation of a byte based cipher such as RC4 into a 32- or 64-bit word version will obviously need vast amounts of memory. This scaling issue necessitates a look for new components and principles, as well as mathematical analysis to justify their use. Our approach, like RC4's, is based on rapidly mixing random walks on directed graphs (that is, walks which reach a random state quickly, from any starting point). We begin with some well understood walks, and then introduce nonlinearity in their steps in order to improve security and show long term statistical correlations are negligible. To minimize the short term correlations, as well as to deter attacks using equations involving successive outputs, we provide a method for sequencing the outputs derived from the walk using three revolving buffers. The cipher is fast -- it runs at a speed of less than 5 cycles per byte on a Pentium IV processor. A word based cipher needs to output more bits per step, which exposes more correlations for attacks. Moreover we seek simplicity of construction and transparent analysis. To meet these requirements, we use a larger state and claim security corresponding to only a fraction of it. Our design is for an adequately secure word-based cipher; our very preliminary estimate puts the security close to exhaustive search for keys of size < 256 bits.Comment: 27 pages, shortened version will appear in "Topics in Cryptology - CT-RSA 2007