Should we use early less invasive hemodynamic monitoring in unstable ICU patients?

In the previous issue of Critical Care, Takala and colleagues presented the results of a multicenter study to investigate whether the early presence of less invasive hemodynamic monitoring improves outcome in patients admitted with hemodynamic instability to the intensive care unit. The authors' results suggest that it makes no difference. We discuss these findings and compare them to the literature on early goal-directed therapy in which monitors are used early but with a protocol

Practical Issues in the Application of Direct Metal Laser Sintering

Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) was introduced to meet the objective of producing metal parts directly from CAD data. CRDM has accumulated six years of experience in applying this technique, mostly to prototyping parts for evaluation. For some applications, such as blow moulds, porosity generated in DMLS has proved to be beneficial, but for others a concession on tolerances or finish are necessary and/or complementary operations are required, which add to manufacturing time and cost. This paper examines such issues through some well chosen examples of parts to demonstrate both the strengths and weaknesses of the DMLS process.Mechanical Engineerin

Entanglement Swapping Chains for General Pure States

We consider entanglement swapping schemes with general (rather than maximally) entangled bipartite states of arbitary dimension shared pairwise between three or more parties in a chain. The intermediate parties perform generalised Bell measurements with the result that the two end parties end up sharing a entangled state which can be converted into maximally entangled states. We obtain an expression for the average amount of maximal entanglement concentrated in such a scheme and show that in a certain reasonably broad class of cases this scheme is provably optimal and that, in these cases, the amount of entanglement concentrated between the two ends is equal to that which could be concentrated from the weakest link in the chain.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

The Initial Value Problem For Maximally Non-Local Actions

We study the initial value problem for actions which contain non-trivial functions of integrals of local functions of the dynamical variable. In contrast to many other non-local actions, the classical solution set of these systems is at most discretely enlarged, and may even be restricted, with respect to that of a local theory. We show that the solutions are those of a local theory whose (spacetime constant) parameters vary with the initial value data according to algebraic equations. The various roots of these algebraic equations can be plausibly interpreted in quantum mechanics as different components of a multi-component wave function. It is also possible that the consistency of these algebraic equations imposes constraints upon the initial value data which appear miraculous from the context of a local theory.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX 2 epsilo

New classes of n-copy undistillable quantum states with negative partial transposition

The discovery of entangled quantum states from which one cannot distill pure entanglement constitutes a fundamental recent advance in the field of quantum information. Such bipartite bound-entangled (BE) quantum states \emph{could} fall into two distinct categories: (1) Inseparable states with positive partial transposition (PPT), and (2) States with negative partial transposition (NPT). While the existence of PPT BE states has been confirmed, \emph{only one} class of \emph{conjectured} NPT BE states has been discovered so far. We provide explicit constructions of a variety of multi-copy undistillable NPT states, and conjecture that they constitute families of NPT BE states. For example, we show that for every pure state of Schmidt rank greater than or equal to three, one can construct n-copy undistillable NPT states, for any $n\geq1$. The abundance of such conjectured NPT BE states, we believe, considerably strengthens the notion that being NPT is only a necessary condition for a state to be distillable.Comment: Latex, 10 page

Optimal approach to quantum communication using dynamic programming

Reliable preparation of entanglement between distant systems is an outstanding problem in quantum information science and quantum communication. In practice, this has to be accomplished via noisy channels (such as optical fibers) that generally result in exponential attenuation of quantum signals at large distances. A special class of quantum error correction protocols--quantum repeater protocols--can be used to overcome such losses. In this work, we introduce a method for systematically optimizing existing protocols and developing new, more efficient protocols. Our approach makes use of a dynamic programming-based searching algorithm, the complexity of which scales only polynomially with the communication distance, letting us efficiently determine near-optimal solutions. We find significant improvements in both the speed and the final state fidelity for preparing long distance entangled states.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Generalized self-testing and the security of the 6-state protocol

Self-tested quantum information processing provides a means for doing useful information processing with untrusted quantum apparatus. Previous work was limited to performing computations and protocols in real Hilbert spaces, which is not a serious obstacle if one is only interested in final measurement statistics being correct (for example, getting the correct factors of a large number after running Shor's factoring algorithm). This limitation was shown by McKague et al. to be fundamental, since there is no way to experimentally distinguish any quantum experiment from a special simulation using states and operators with only real coefficients. In this paper, we show that one can still do a meaningful self-test of quantum apparatus with complex amplitudes. In particular, we define a family of simulations of quantum experiments, based on complex conjugation, with two interesting properties. First, we are able to define a self-test which may be passed only by states and operators that are equivalent to simulations within the family. This extends work of Mayers and Yao and Magniez et al. in self-testing of quantum apparatus, and includes a complex measurement. Second, any of the simulations in the family may be used to implement a secure 6-state QKD protocol, which was previously not known to be implementable in a self-tested framework.Comment: To appear in proceedings of TQC 201

Laser-like Instabilities in Quantum Nano-electromechanical Systems

We discuss negative damping regimes in quantum nano-electromechanical systems formed by coupling a mechanical oscillator to a single-electron transistor (normal or superconducting). Using an analogy to a laser with a tunable atom-field coupling, we demonstrate how these effects scale with system parameters. We also discuss the fluctuation physics of both the oscillator and the single-electron transistor in this regime, and the degree to which the oscillator motion is coherent.Comment: 4+ pages, 1 figure; reference to the work of Dykman and Krivoglaz adde

Activating bound entanglement in multi-particle systems

We analyze the existence of activable bound entangled states in multi-particle systems. We first give a series of examples which illustrate some different ways in which bound entangled states can be activated by letting some of the parties to share maximally entangled states. Then, we derive necessary conditions for a state to be distillable as well as to be activable. These conditions turn out to be also sufficient for a certain family of multi-qubit states. We use these results to explicitely to construct states displaying novel properties related to bound entanglement and its activation.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Irreversibility in asymptotic manipulations of entanglement

We show that the process of entanglement distillation is irreversible by showing that the entanglement cost of a bound entangled state is finite. Such irreversibility remains even if extra pure entanglement is loaned to assist the distillation process.Comment: RevTex, 3 pages, no figures Result on indistillability of PPT states under pure entanglement catalytic LOCC adde