Grotta Romanelli (Southern Italy, Apulia). Legacies and issues in excavating a key site for the Pleistocene of the Mediterranean

Grotta Romanelli, located on the Adriatic coast of southern Apulia (Italy), is considered a key site for the Mediterranean Pleistocene for its archaeological and palaeontological contents. The site, discovered in 1874, was re-evaluated only in 1900, when P. E. Stasi realised that it contained the first evidence of the Palaeolithic in Italy. Starting in 1914, G. A. Blanc led a pioneering excavation campaign, for the first-time using scientific methods applied to systematic palaeontological and stratigraphical studies. Blanc proposed a stratigraphic framework for the cave. Different dating methods (C-14 and U/Th) were used to temporally constrain the deposits. The extensive studies of the cave and its contents were mostly published in journals with limited distribution and access, until the end of the 1970s, when the site became forgotten. In 2015, with the permission of the authorities, a new excavation campaign began, led by a team from Sapienza University of Rome in collaboration with IGAG CNR and other research institutions. The research team had to deal with the consequences of more than 40 years of inactivity in the field and the combined effect of erosion and legal, as well as illegal, excavations. In this paper, we provide a database of all the information published during the first 70 years of excavations and highlight the outstanding problems and contradictions between the chronological and geomorphological evidence, the features of the faunal assemblages and the limestone artefacts

Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?

Probably not.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur

Nonlinear propagation equations in fibers with multiple modes—Transitions between representation bases

The transverse pattern of the field that propagates in a fiber supporting multiple modes can always be described as a superposition of the patterns of the individual fiber modes. Yet, the use of other bases is often found to be more convenient, with the most famous example being that of linearly polarized modes in weakly guiding fibers. The nonlinear propagation equations contain coefficients that involve overlap integrals between the lateral profiles of multiple propagation modes. A fundamental question that has been raised in this context is whether it is legitimate to compute these coefficients from the overlap integrals between elements of alternative bases for the field representation. In this paper, we show that the answer to this question is positive in the most general sense. This result is significant in the context of space-division multiplexed transmission in multi-mode and multi-core fibers.The transverse pattern of the field that propagates in a fiber supporting multiple modes can always be described as a superposition of the patterns of the individual fiber modes. Yet, the use of other bases is often found to be more convenient, with the most famous example being that of linearly polarized modes in weakly guiding fibers. The nonlinear propagation equations contain coefficients that involve overlap integrals between the lateral profiles of multiple propagation modes. A fundamental question that has been raised in this context is whether it is legitimate to compute these coefficients from the overlap integrals between elements of alternative bases for the field representation. In this paper, we show that the answer to this question is positive in the most general sense. This result is significant in the context of space-division multiplexed transmission in multi-mode and multi-core fibers

Nonclassical correlations in damped quantum solitons

Using cumulant expansion in Gaussian approximation, the internal quantum statistics of damped soliton-like pulses in Kerr media are studied numerically, considering both narrow and finite bandwidth spectral pulse components. It is shown that the sub-Poissonian statistics can be enhanced, under certain circumstances, by absorption, which damps out some destructive interferences. Further, it is shown that both the photon-number correlation and the correlation of the photon-number variance between different pulse components can be highly nonclassical even for an absorbing fiber. Optimum frequency windows are determined in order to realize strong nonclassical behavior, which offers novel possibilities of using solitons in optical fibers as a source of nonclassically correlated light beams.Comment: 15 pages, 11 PS figures (color

Deep Learning-Based Phase Retrieval Scheme for Minimum-Phase Signal Recovery

We propose a deep learning-based phase retrieval method to accurately reconstruct the optical field of a single-sideband minimum-phase signal from the directly detected intensity waveform. Our method relies on a fully convolutional Neural Network (NN) model to realize non-iterative and robust phase retrieval. The NN is trained so that it performs full-field reconstruction and jointly compensates for transmission impairments. Compared to the recently proposed Kramers-Kronig (KK) receiver, our method avoids the distortions introduced by the nonlinear operations involved in the KK phase-retrieval algorithm and hence does not require digital upsampling. We validate the proposed phase-retrieval method by means of extensive numerical simulations in relevant system settings, and we compare the performance of the proposed scheme with the conventional KK receiver operated with a 4-fold digital upsampling. The results show that the 7% hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold at BER 3.8e-3 can be achieved with up to 2.8 dB lower carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) value and 1.8 dB better receiver sensitivity compared to the conventional 4-fold upsampled KK receiver. We also present a comparative analysis of the complexity of the proposed scheme with that of the KK receiver, showing that the proposed scheme can achieve the 7% HD-FEC threshold with 1.6 dB lower CSPR, 0.4 dB better receiver sensitivity, and 36% lower complexity

Generation and manipulation of squeezed states of light in optical networks for quantum communication and computation

We analyze a fiber-optic component which could find multiple uses in novel information-processing systems utilizing squeezed states of light. Our approach is based on the phenomenon of photon-number squeezing of soliton noise after the soliton has propagated through a nonlinear optical fiber. Applications of this component in optical networks for quantum computation and quantum cryptography are discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures; submitted to Journal of Optics

Theory of quantum fluctuations of optical dissipative structures and its application to the squeezing properties of bright cavity solitons

We present a method for the study of quantum fluctuations of dissipative structures forming in nonlinear optical cavities, which we illustrate in the case of a degenerate, type I optical parametric oscillator. The method consists in (i) taking into account explicitly, through a collective variable description, the drift of the dissipative structure caused by the quantum noise, and (ii) expanding the remaining -internal- fluctuations in the biorthonormal basis associated to the linear operator governing the evolution of fluctuations in the linearized Langevin equations. We obtain general expressions for the squeezing and intensity fluctuations spectra. Then we theoretically study the squeezing properties of a special dissipative structure, namely, the bright cavity soliton. After reviewing our previous result that in the linear approximation there is a perfectly squeezed mode irrespectively of the values of the system parameters, we consider squeezing at the bifurcation points, and the squeezing detection with a plane--wave local oscillator field, taking also into account the effect of the detector size on the level of detectable squeezing.Comment: 10 figure

On the trail of medieval wolves: ancient DNA, CT-based analyses and palaeopathology of a 1000-year-old wolf cranium from the Po Valley (northern Italy)

The Middle Ages represented a crucial period for the evolutionary history of wolves (Canis lupus), marked by both significant ecosystem changes, especially through the degradation of wooded landscapes and heavy persecution, that drove this species to a dramatic demographic decline. In Europe, informative and well-documented wolf remains from the Medieval Ages are exceptionally rare and are mostly represented by teeth and postcranial elements. In this study, we describe a well-preserved wolf cranium dated to ca. 967–1157 AD from the Po Valley (northern Italy). The specimen was analysed through a multidisciplinary approach including CT-based, ancient DNA, and palaeopathological analyses. Morphological and genetic data supported the assignment of this sample to Canis lupus species. CT-based analyses indicated a typical wolf-like morphology falling into the extant variability of the medium-sized subspecies C. lupus italicus, whereas palaeopathological analyses indicated a severe periodontitis. Phylogenetic analyses showed that the Po valley wolf had a unique and never described mtDNA control region haplotype, testifying variability in the ancient Italian wolf, which has now been lost. This study provides the first comprehensive description of a wolf from the Middle Ages, adding useful information for a deeper knowledge about population dynamics, variability, and diseases of this species

The Italian research project ROAD-NGN ‘Optical frequency/wavelength division multiple access techniques for next generation networks'

The paper describes the activities of the Italian national research project ROAD-NGN ‘Optical frequency/wavelength division multiple access techniques for next generation networks’; the project aims to investigate and experiment new technological solutions to facilitate the migration of access systems from copper to optical fibre, and to help the integration with broadband wireless architectures, with particular interest for the backhauling of the fourth generation (4G) Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. The approaches, based on the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) techniques, can enable the unbundling of the local loop (ULL) and are upgradable toward very ultra wideband systems

Optical parametric oscillation with distributed feedback in cold atoms

There is currently a strong interest in mirrorless lasing systems, in which the electromagnetic feedback is provided either by disorder (multiple scattering in the gain medium) or by order (multiple Bragg reflection). These mechanisms correspond, respectively, to random lasers and photonic crystal lasers. The crossover regime between order and disorder, or correlated disorder, has also been investigated with some success. Here, we report one-dimensional photonic-crystal lasing (that is, distributed feedback lasing) with a cold atom cloud that simultaneously provides both gain and feedback. The atoms are trapped in a one-dimensional lattice, producing a density modulation that creates a strong Bragg reflection with a small angle of incidence. Pumping the atoms with auxiliary beams induces four-wave mixing, which provides parametric gain. The combination of both ingredients generates a mirrorless parametric oscillation with a conical output emission, the apex angle of which is tunable with the lattice periodicity