Using Microsatellites to Assess Genetic Variation in a Selective Breeding Program of Chinese Bay Scallop (Argopecten irradians irradians)

This study aimed to improve our understanding of the genetics of the Chinese bay scallop (Argopecten irradians irradians), one of the most important maricultured shellfish in China. Ten polymorphic microsatellite loci were examined to assess the allelic diversity, heterozygosity, and genetic variation between two domesticated populations selected for fast growth in breeding programs, and their base population. Forty-one alleles were found throughout the loci and the mean number of alleles per locus ranged 3.30-3.50. The average heterozygosity ranged 0.38-0.45, whereas the polyamorphic information content ranged 0.1504-0.7518. Genetic differences between the three populations were detected based on the number of alleles per locus, effective number of alleles, Shannon index, inbreeding coefficient (Fis), p values, genetic distance, and pairwise Fst values. There was no significant loss of genetic variability in the breeding program but changes in gene frequencies were detectable over the populations, implying that thea loci were saffected by the pressures of selective culture

Dynamical decoupling of superconducting qubits

We show that two superconducting qubits interacting via a fixed transversal coupling can be decoupled by appropriately-designed microwave feld excitations applied to each qubit. This technique is useful for removing the effects of spurious interactions in a quantum processor. We also simulate the case of a qubit coupled to a two-level system (TLS) present in the insulating layer of the Josephson junction of the qubit. Finally, we discuss the qubit-TLS problem in the context of dispersive measurements, where the qubit is coupled to a resonator.Comment: 4 figures, 6 page

Effect of dimensions on the efficiency of radiant energy cells

Effect of dimensions on quantum and photovoltaic energy conversion efficiency of germanium p-n semiconducting cell

Convergence of the Lasserre Hierarchy of SDP Relaxations for Convex Polynomial Programs without Compactness

The Lasserre hierarchy of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations is an effective scheme for finding computationally feasible SDP approximations of polynomial optimization over compact semi-algebraic sets. In this paper, we show that, for convex polynomial optimization, the Lasserre hierarchy with a slightly extended quadratic module always converges asymptotically even in the face of non-compact semi-algebraic feasible sets. We do this by exploiting a coercivity property of convex polynomials that are bounded below. We further establish that the positive definiteness of the Hessian of the associated Lagrangian at a saddle-point (rather than the objective function at each minimizer) guarantees finite convergence of the hierarchy. We obtain finite convergence by first establishing a new sum-of-squares polynomial representation of convex polynomials over convex semi-algebraic sets under a saddle-point condition. We finally prove that the existence of a saddle-point of the Lagrangian for a convex polynomial program is also necessary for the hierarchy to have finite convergence.Comment: 17 page

Measurement-induced entanglement of two superconducting qubits

We study the problem of two superconducting quantum qubits coupled via a resonator. If only one quanta is present in the system and the number of photons in the resonator is measured with a null result, the qubits end up in an entangled Bell state. Here we look at one source of errors in this quantum nondemolition scheme due to the presence of more than one quanta in the resonator, previous to the measurement. By analyzing the structure of the conditional Hamiltonian with arbitrary number of quanta, we show that the scheme is remarkably robust against these type of errors.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure