Double pulses and cascades above 2 PeV in IceCube

IceCube collaboration has seen an unexpected population of high energy neutrinos compatible with an astrophysical origin. We consider two categories of events that can help to diagnose cosmic neutrinos: double pulse, that may allow us to clearly discriminate the cosmic component of tau neutrinos; cascades with deposited energy above 2 PeV, including events produced by electron antineutrinos at the Glashow resonance, that can be used to investigate the neutrino production mechanisms. We show that one half of the double pulse signal is due to the neutrinos spectral region already probed by IceCube. By normalizing to HESE data, we find that 10 more years are required to obtain 90% probability to observe a double pulse. The cascades above 2 PeV provide us a sensitive probe of the high energy tail of the neutrino spectrum and are potentially observable, but even in this case, the dependence on type of the source is mild. In fact we find that pp or p{\gamma} mechanisms give a difference in the number of cascades above 2 PeV of about 25 % that can be discriminated at 2{\sigma} in about 50 years of data taking.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in EPJ

The Early Growth of the First Black Holes

With detections of quasars powered by increasingly massive black holes (BHs) at increasingly early times in cosmic history over the past decade, there has been correspondingly rapid progress made on the theory of early BH formation and growth. Here we review the emerging picture of how the first massive BHs formed from the primordial gas and then grew to supermassive scales. We discuss the initial conditions for the formation of the progenitors of these seed BHs, the factors dictating the initial masses with which they form, and their initial stages of growth via accretion, which may occur at super-Eddington rates. Finally, we briefly discuss how these results connect to large-scale simulations of the growth of supermassive BHs over the course of the first billion years following the Big Bang.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, invited review accepted for publication in PAS

Protecting entanglement via the quantum Zeno effect

We study the exact entanglement dynamics of two atoms in a lossy resonator. Besides discussing the steady-state entanglement, we show that in the strong coupling regime the system-reservoir correlations induce entanglement revivals and oscillations and propose a strategy to fight against the deterioration of the entanglement using the quantum Zeno effect.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Characterizing topological order by studying the ground states of an infinite cylinder

Given a microscopic lattice Hamiltonian for a topologically ordered phase, we describe a tensor network approach to characterize its emergent anyon model and, in a chiral phase, also its gapless edge theory. First, a tensor network representation of a complete, orthonormal set of ground states on a cylinder of infinite length and finite width is obtained through numerical optimization. Each of these ground states is argued to have a different anyonic flux threading through the cylinder. In a chiral phase, the entanglement spectrum of each ground state is seen to reveal a different sector of the corresponding gapless edge theory. A quasi-orthogonal basis on the torus is then produced by chopping off and reconnecting the tensor network representation on the cylinder. Elaborating on the recent proposal of [Y. Zhang et al. Phys. Rev. B 85, 235151 (2012)], a rotation on the torus yields an alternative basis of ground states and, through the computation of overlaps between bases, the modular matrices S and U (containing the mutual and self statistics of the different anyon species) are extracted. As an application, we study the hard-core boson Haldane model by using the two-dimensional density matrix renormalization group. A thorough characterization of the universal properties of this lattice model, both in the bulk and at the edge, unambiguously shows that its ground space realizes the \nu=1/2 bosonic Laughlin state.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure

A Dynamic Boundary Guarding Problem with Translating Targets

We introduce a problem in which a service vehicle seeks to guard a deadline (boundary) from dynamically arriving mobile targets. The environment is a rectangle and the deadline is one of its edges. Targets arrive continuously over time on the edge opposite the deadline, and move towards the deadline at a fixed speed. The goal for the vehicle is to maximize the fraction of targets that are captured before reaching the deadline. We consider two cases; when the service vehicle is faster than the targets, and; when the service vehicle is slower than the targets. In the first case we develop a novel vehicle policy based on computing longest paths in a directed acyclic graph. We give a lower bound on the capture fraction of the policy and show that the policy is optimal when the distance between the target arrival edge and deadline becomes very large. We present numerical results which suggest near optimal performance away from this limiting regime. In the second case, when the targets are slower than the vehicle, we propose a policy based on servicing fractions of the translational minimum Hamiltonian path. In the limit of low target speed and high arrival rate, the capture fraction of this policy is within a small constant factor of the optimal.Comment: Extended version of paper for the joint 48th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and 28th Chinese Control Conferenc