Electron Teleportation in Multi-Terminal Majorana Islands: Statistical Transmutation and Fractional Quantum Conductance

We study a topological superconductor island with spatially separated Majorana modes coupled to multiple normal metal leads by single electron tunneling in the Coulomb blockade regime. We show that low-temperature transport in such Majorana island is carried by an emergent charge-$e$ boson composed of a Majorana mode and an electron from the leads. This transmutation from Fermi to Bose statistics has remarkable consequences. For noninteracting leads, the system flows to a non-Fermi liquid fixed point, which is stable against tunnel couplings anisotropy or detuning away from the charge-degeneracy point. As a result, the system exhibits a universal conductance at zero temperature, which is a fraction of the conductance quantum, and low-temperature corrections with a universal power-law exponent. In addition, we consider Majorana islands connected to interacting one-dimensional leads, and find different stable fixed points near and far from the charge-degeneracy point.Comment: 10+ pages, 5 figure

Ideological Perfectionism

Studying a high-stakes field setting, we examine which individuals, on an ideological scale, conform more to the opinion of others. In the U.S. Courts of Appeals, legal precedents are set by ideologically diverse and randomly composed panels of judges. Using exogenous predictors of ideology and rich voting data we show that ideological disagreements drive dissents against the panel’s decision, but ideologically extreme judges are caving in: they are the least likely to dissent and their voting records are the least correlated with their predicted ideology. Meanwhile, moderately ideological judges are dissenting the most despite evidence that they are more often determining the opinion. Our theoretical analysis shows that these findings are most consistent with a model of decision making in the presence of peer pressure with a concave cost of deviating from one’s ideological convictions – perfectionism. This result presents a critique of a standard assumption in economics – that the cost of deviating from one’s bliss point is convex – with fundamental implications for decision making in social and political settings and for the empirical predictions of theoretical models in these domains

Ideological Perfectionism

Studying a high-stakes field setting, we examine which individuals, on an ideological scale, conform more to the opinion of others. In the U.S. Courts of Appeals, legal precedents are set by ideologically diverse and randomly composed panels of judges. Using exogenous predictors of ideology and rich voting data we show that ideological disagreements drive dissents against the panel’s decision, but ideologically extreme judges are caving in: they are the least likely to dissent and their voting records are the least correlated with their predicted ideology. Meanwhile, moderately ideological judges are dissenting the most despite evidence that they are more often determining the opinion. Our theoretical analysis shows that these findings are most consistent with a model of decision making in the presence of peer pressure with a concave cost of deviating from one’s ideological convictions – perfectionism. This result presents a critique of a standard assumption in economics – that the cost of deviating from one’s bliss point is convex – with fundamental implications for decision making in social and political settings and for the empirical predictions of theoretical models in these domains

Motion Deblurring in the Wild

The task of image deblurring is a very ill-posed problem as both the image and the blur are unknown. Moreover, when pictures are taken in the wild, this task becomes even more challenging due to the blur varying spatially and the occlusions between the object. Due to the complexity of the general image model we propose a novel convolutional network architecture which directly generates the sharp image.This network is built in three stages, and exploits the benefits of pyramid schemes often used in blind deconvolution. One of the main difficulties in training such a network is to design a suitable dataset. While useful data can be obtained by synthetically blurring a collection of images, more realistic data must be collected in the wild. To obtain such data we use a high frame rate video camera and keep one frame as the sharp image and frame average as the corresponding blurred image. We show that this realistic dataset is key in achieving state-of-the-art performance and dealing with occlusions

Parameter extraction in multi step exponential signal

Peer Reviewe

Effects of endotoxin on lactate metabolism in humans.

ABSTRACT: INTRODUCTION: Hyperlactatemia represents one prominent component of the metabolic response to sepsis. In critically ill patients, hyperlactatemia is related to the severity of the underlying condition. Both an increased production and a decreased utilization and clearance might be involved in this process, but their relative contribution remains unknown. The present study aimed at assessing systemic and muscle lactate production and systemic lactate clearance in healthy human volunteers, using intravenous endotoxin (LPS) challenge. METHODS: Fourteen healthy male volunteers were enrolled in 2 consecutive studies (n = 6 in trial 1 and n = 8 in trial 2). Each subject took part in one of two investigation days (LPS-day with endotoxin injection and placebo-day with saline injection) separated by one week at least and in a random order. In trial 1, their muscle lactate metabolism was monitored using microdialysis. In trial 2, their systemic lactate metabolism was monitored by means of a constant infusion of exogenous lactate. Energy metabolism was monitored by indirect calorimetry and glucose kinetics was measured with 6,6-H2 glucose. RESULTS: In both trials, LPS increased energy expenditure (p = 0.011), lipid oxidation (p<0.0001), and plasma lactate concentration (p = 0.016). In trial 1, lactate concentration in the muscle microdialysate was higher than in blood, indicating lactate production by muscles. This was, however, similar with and without LPS. In trial 2, calculated systemic lactate production increased after LPS (p = 0.031), while lactate clearance remained unchanged. CONCLUSIONS: LPS administration increases lactatemia by increasing lactate production rather than by decreasing lactate clearance. Muscle is, however, unlikely to be a major contributor to this increase in lactate production. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01647997

Quantum kinetic approach to the calculation of the Nernst effect

We show that the strong Nernst effect observed recently in amorphous superconducting films far above the critical temperature is caused by the fluctuations of the superconducting order parameter. We employ the quantum kinetic approach for the derivation of the Nernst coefficient. We present here the main steps of the calculation and discuss some subtle issues that we encountered while calculating the Nernst coefficient. In particular, we demonstrate that in the limit T=0 the contribution of the magnetization ensures the vanishing of the Nernst signal in accordance with the third law of thermodynamics. We obtained a striking agreement between our theoretical calculations and the experimental data in a broad region of temperatures and magnetic fields.Comment: 24 pages, 13 figure

Emergent nanoscale superparamagnetism at oxide interfaces

Atomically sharp oxide heterostructures exhibit a range of novel physical phenomena that do not occur in the parent bulk compounds. The most prominent example is the appearance of highly conducting and superconducting states at the interface between the band insulators LaAlO3 and SrTiO3. Here we report a new emergent phenomenon at the LaMnO3/SrTiO3 interface in which an antiferromagnetic insulator abruptly transforms into a magnetic state that exhibits unexpected nanoscale superparamagnetic dynamics. Upon increasing the thickness of LaMnO3 above five unit cells, our scanning nanoSQUID-on-tip microscopy shows spontaneous formation of isolated magnetic islands of 10 to 50 nm diameter, which display random moment reversals by thermal activation or in response to an in-plane magnetic field. Our charge reconstruction model of the polar LaMnO3/SrTiO3 heterostructure describes the sharp emergence of thermodynamic phase separation leading to nucleation of metallic ferromagnetic islands in an insulating antiferromagnetic matrix. The model further suggests that the nearby superparamagnetic-ferromagnetic transition can be gate tuned, holding potential for applications in magnetic storage and spintronics

Quantum kinetic approach for studying thermal transport in the presence of electron-electron interactions and disorder

A user friendly scheme based on the quantum kinetic equation is developed for studying thermal transport phenomena in the presence of interactions and disorder. We demonstrate that this scheme is suitable for both a systematic perturbative calculation as well as a general analysis. We believe that we present an adequate alternative to the Kubo formula, which for the thermal transport is rather cumbersome.Comment: 30 pages, 16 figure

Legitimizing Policy

In many settings of political bargaining over policy, agents care not only about getting their will but also about having others approve the chosen policy thus giving it more weight. What is the effect on the bargaining outcome when agents care about such legitimacy of the policy? We study this question theoretically and empirically. We show that the median-voter theorem holds in groups that are ideologically very cohesive and in groups with extreme ideological disagreement. However, in groups with intermediate ideological disagreement, the median-voter theorem does not hold. This is since, on the individual level, ideological disagreement with the median has a non-monotonic effect on the policy. We test our model in a natural experimental setting—U.S. appeals courts—where causal identification is based on random assignment of judges into judicial panels, each consisting of three judges who rule on a case. Here judges care about legitimacy of the policy they write because a norm of consensus prevails and because increased legitimacy reduces the likelihood of the judicial case to be heard by the Supreme Court. The predicted pattern of how policies depend on the participants’ ideologies are corroborated by our empirical tests