Bootstrapping Q Methodology to Improve the Understanding of Human Perspectives.

Q is a semi-qualitative methodology to identify typologies of perspectives. It is appropriate to address questions concerning diverse viewpoints, plurality of discourses, or participation processes across disciplines. Perspectives are interpreted based on rankings of a set of statements. These rankings are analysed using multivariate data reduction techniques in order to find similarities between respondents. Discussing the analytical process and looking for progress in Q methodology is becoming increasingly relevant. While its use is growing in social, health and environmental studies, the analytical process has received little attention in the last decades and it has not benefited from recent statistical and computational advances. Specifically, the standard procedure provides overall and arguably simplistic variability measures for perspectives and none of these measures are associated to individual statements, on which the interpretation is based. This paper presents an innovative approach of bootstrapping Q to obtain additional and more detailed measures of variability, which helps researchers understand better their data and the perspectives therein. This approach provides measures of variability that are specific to each statement and perspective, and additional measures that indicate the degree of certainty with which each respondent relates to each perspective. This supplementary information may add or subtract strength to particular arguments used to describe the perspectives. We illustrate and show the usefulness of this approach with an empirical example. The paper provides full details for other researchers to implement the bootstrap in Q studies with any data collection design

Correlation between entanglement and spin density in nitrogen-vacancy center of diamond

Many-body wavefunctions were utilized to calculate von Neumann’s entropy as an entanglement measurement for neutral and negatively charged nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond. A generalized Hubbard Hamiltonian which considers e-e interaction terms completely was used to calculate many-electron wavefunctions of the ground and excited states. Correlation between entanglement and spin density distributed on neighboring atoms of NV is presented. The behavior of spin density and entanglement under relaxations of neighboring atoms is the same for all investigated ground and excited states. The results suggest that the spin density may be used to quantify the entanglemnt and vice versa

Effect of lattice relaxation on spin density of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond and oscillator strength calculations

Using a generalized Hubbard Hamiltonian, many-electron wavefunctions of negatively charged (NV−) and neutral nitrogen-vacancy (NV0) centers in diamond were calculated. We report the effect of symmetric relaxation of surrounding atoms on the spin density, calculated from the many electron wavefunctions in the ground and excited states. We evaluated the error, that, arises in estimation of spin density when lattice relaxation effect is neglected in Electron Paramagnetic Resonance experiment and showed that the ground state spin density distribution is accessible in outward relaxations. The computed oscillator strengths give a higher efficiency for the 1.945 eV photoluminescence (PL) line of NV− with respect to 2.156 eV PL line of NV0 which agrees well with experiment. This result is explained based on the largest the ground state spin among available values for the NV− with respect to NV0. The transition probability between degenerate ground and excited states slightly depends on the Sz value. Finally, we report on the electronic configurations which contribute to the ground and excited states and discuss the population variation of electronic configurations with relaxation