2,995 research outputs found
Ground state cooling of atoms in optical lattices
We propose two schemes for cooling bosonic and fermionic atoms that are
trapped in a deep optical lattice. The first scheme is a quantum algorithm
based on particle number filtering and state dependent lattice shifts. The
second protocol alternates filtering with a redistribution of particles by
means of quantum tunnelling. We provide a complete theoretical analysis of both
schemes and characterize the cooling efficiency in terms of the entropy. Our
schemes do not require addressing of single lattice sites and use a novel
method, which is based on coherent laser control, to perform very fast
filtering.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure
The Power of Light Zine 1 - Why do things change? - an epistemically insightful way to explore the nature of science and research at Diamond Light Source, UK
In the STFC funded Epistemic Insight Initiative project, The Power of Light, a series of resources have been designed informed by co-creation activities, pilot lessons, and workshops that involved children in schools and with their families in community spaces. Through this project with Diamond, we brought into classrooms and community spaces how light can be used to help investigate the world around us, address real-world problems and inform our thinking about Big Questions. The resources we develop support teachers' and their students' sense of agency when exploring 'how knowledge works' and how knowledge is built through different disciplines (including the natural sciences, the arts, and the humanities).
This 'zine', with its focus on how scientists have been working with historians and archaeologists to preserve the Mary Rose (Henry the Eighth's favourite ship that was sunk in the Solent in England's southern coast), has been developed through co-creative activities involving research scientists at Diamond Light Source (UK), academics, primary school teachers, STEM ambassadors, and Diamond's public engagement team.
Zines use an appealing combination of text and images to create a concise comic-like narrative format to generate enthusiasm about a particular area of interest - the series of zines designed for this project focuses on research taking place at the Diamond facility. The Diamond Light Source facility houses a synchrotron which is used to conduct research in a variety of applied fields of science and technology.
This zine is designed to be accessible to ages 8+, and works well with a short animation (available in both Zenodo and on the Epistemic Insight You Tube channel) that has been created with additional funding from STFC. Teaching notes are available for this zine, with guidance and activity sheets to support working with the Power of Light resources.
This zine explores these discussion questions: 1) What are examples of changes we can observe? 2) What helps us to know more about the things around us? 3) What might we use to help us observe changes
Robust, reproducible, industrialized, standard membrane feeding assay for assessing the transmission blocking activity of vaccines and drugs against Plasmodium falciparum.
BackgroundA vaccine that interrupts malaria transmission (VIMT) would be a valuable tool for malaria control and elimination. One VIMT approach is to identify sexual erythrocytic and mosquito stage antigens of the malaria parasite that induce immune responses targeted at disrupting parasite development in the mosquito. The standard Plasmodium falciparum membrane-feeding assay (SMFA) is used to assess transmission-blocking activity (TBA) of antibodies against candidate immunogens and of drugs targeting the mosquito stages. To develop its P. falciparum sporozoite (SPZ) products, Sanaria has industrialized the production of P. falciparum-infected Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes, incorporating quantitative analyses of oocyst and P. falciparum SPZ infections as part of the manufacturing process.MethodsThese capabilities were exploited to develop a robust, reliable, consistent SMFA that was used to assess 188 serum samples from animals immunized with the candidate vaccine immunogen, Pfs25, targeting P. falciparum mosquito stages. Seventy-four independent SMFAs were performed. Infection intensity (number of oocysts/mosquito) and infection prevalence (percentage of mosquitoes infected with oocysts) were compared between mosquitoes fed cultured gametocytes plus normal human O(+) serum (negative control), anti-Pfs25 polyclonal antisera (MRA39 or MRA38, at a final dilution in the blood meal of 1:54 as positive control), and test sera from animals immunized with Pfs25 (at a final dilution in the blood meal of 1:9).ResultsSMFA negative controls consistently yielded high infection intensity (mean = 46.1 oocysts/midgut, range of positives 3.7-135.6) and infection prevalence (mean = 94.2%, range 71.4-100.0) and in positive controls, infection intensity was reduced by 81.6% (anti-Pfs25 MRA39) and 97.0% (anti-Pfs25 MRA38), and infection prevalence was reduced by 12.9 and 63.5%, respectively. A range of TBAs was detected among the 188 test samples assayed in duplicate. Consistent administration of infectious gametocytes to mosquitoes within and between assays was achieved, and the TBA of anti-Pfs25 control antibodies was highly reproducible.ConclusionsThese results demonstrate a robust capacity to perform the SMFA in a medium-to-high throughput format, suitable for assessing large numbers of experimental samples of candidate antibodies or drugs
Local Versus Global Thermal States: Correlations and the Existence of Local Temperatures
We consider a quantum system consisting of a regular chain of elementary
subsystems with nearest neighbor interactions and assume that the total system
is in a canonical state with temperature . We analyze under what condition
the state factors into a product of canonical density matrices with respect to
groups of subsystems each, and when these groups have the same temperature
. While in classical mechanics the validity of this procedure only depends
on the size of the groups , in quantum mechanics the minimum group size
also depends on the temperature ! As examples, we apply our
analysis to a harmonic chain and different types of Ising spin chains. We
discuss various features that show up due to the characteristics of the models
considered. For the harmonic chain, which successfully describes thermal
properties of insulating solids, our approach gives a first quantitative
estimate of the minimal length scale on which temperature can exist: This
length scale is found to be constant for temperatures above the Debye
temperature and proportional to below.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, discussion of results extended, accepted for
publication in Phys. Rev.
Use of approximations of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman inequality for solving periodic optimization problems
We show that necessary and sufficient conditions of optimality in periodic
optimization problems can be stated in terms of a solution of the corresponding
HJB inequality, the latter being equivalent to a max-min type variational
problem considered on the space of continuously differentiable functions. We
approximate the latter with a maximin problem on a finite dimensional subspace
of the space of continuously differentiable functions and show that a solution
of this problem (existing under natural controllability conditions) can be used
for construction of near optimal controls. We illustrate the construction with
a numerical example.Comment: 29 pages, 2 figure
Thermodynamics and Universality for Mean Field Quantum Spin Glasses
We study aspects of the thermodynamics of quantum versions of spin glasses.
By means of the Lie-Trotter formula for exponential sums of operators, we adapt
methods used to analyze classical spin glass models to answer analogous
questions about quantum models.Comment: 17 page
Multidimensional Gaussian sums arising from distribution of Birkhoff sums in zero entropy dynamical systems
A duality formula, of the Hardy and Littlewood type for multidimensional
Gaussian sums, is proved in order to estimate the asymptotic long time behavior
of distribution of Birkhoff sums of a sequence generated by a skew
product dynamical system on the torus, with zero Lyapounov
exponents. The sequence, taking the values , is pairwise independent
(but not independent) ergodic sequence with infinite range dependence. The
model corresponds to the motion of a particle on an infinite cylinder, hopping
backward and forward along its axis, with a transversal acceleration parameter
. We show that when the parameter is rational then all
the moments of the normalized sums , but the second, are
unbounded with respect to n, while for irrational , with bounded
continuous fraction representation, all these moments are finite and bounded
with respect to n.Comment: To be published in J. Phys.
Information Loss in Coarse Graining of Polymer Configurations via Contact Matrices
Contact matrices provide a coarse grained description of the configuration
omega of a linear chain (polymer or random walk) on Z^n: C_{ij}(omega)=1 when
the distance between the position of the i-th and j-th step are less than or
equal to some distance "a" and C_{ij}(omega)=0 otherwise. We consider models in
which polymers of length N have weights corresponding to simple and
self-avoiding random walks, SRW and SAW, with "a" the minimal permissible
distance. We prove that to leading order in N, the number of matrices equals
the number of walks for SRW, but not for SAW. The coarse grained Shannon
entropies for SRW agree with the fine grained ones for n <= 2, but differs for
n >= 3.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, latex2e Main change: the introduction is
rewritten in a less formal way with the main results explained in simple
term
Probabilistic movement modeling for intention inference in human-robot interaction.
Intention inference can be an essential step toward efficient humanrobot interaction. For this purpose, we propose the Intention-Driven Dynamics Model (IDDM) to probabilistically model the generative process of movements that are directed by the intention. The IDDM allows to infer the intention from observed movements using Bayes ’ theorem. The IDDM simultaneously finds a latent state representation of noisy and highdimensional observations, and models the intention-driven dynamics in the latent states. As most robotics applications are subject to real-time constraints, we develop an efficient online algorithm that allows for real-time intention inference. Two human-robot interaction scenarios, i.e., target prediction for robot table tennis and action recognition for interactive humanoid robots, are used to evaluate the performance of our inference algorithm. In both intention inference tasks, the proposed algorithm achieves substantial improvements over support vector machines and Gaussian processes.
A Holder Continuous Nowhere Improvable Function with Derivative Singular Distribution
We present a class of functions in which is variant
of the Knopp class of nowhere differentiable functions. We derive estimates
which establish \mathcal{K} \sub C^{0,\al}(\R) for 0<\al<1 but no is pointwise anywhere improvable to C^{0,\be} for any \be>\al.
In particular, all 's are nowhere differentiable with derivatives singular
distributions. furnishes explicit realizations of the functional
analytic result of Berezhnoi.
Recently, the author and simulteously others laid the foundations of
Vector-Valued Calculus of Variations in (Katzourakis), of
-Extremal Quasiconformal maps (Capogna and Raich, Katzourakis) and of
Optimal Lipschitz Extensions of maps (Sheffield and Smart). The "Euler-Lagrange
PDE" of Calculus of Variations in is the nonlinear nondivergence
form Aronsson PDE with as special case the -Laplacian.
Using , we construct singular solutions for these PDEs. In the
scalar case, we partially answered the open regularity problem of
Viscosity Solutions to Aronsson's PDE (Katzourakis). In the vector case, the
solutions can not be rigorously interpreted by existing PDE theories and
justify our new theory of Contact solutions for fully nonlinear systems
(Katzourakis). Validity of arguments of our new theory and failure of classical
approaches both rely on the properties of .Comment: 5 figures, accepted to SeMA Journal (2012), to appea
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