A Measurement of Secondary Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies with Two Years of South Pole Telescope Observations

We present the first three-frequency South Pole Telescope (SPT) cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectra. The band powers presented here cover angular scales 2000 < ℓ < 9400 in frequency bands centered at 95, 150, and 220 GHz. At these frequencies and angular scales, a combination of the primary CMB anisotropy, thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effects, radio galaxies, and cosmic infrared background (CIB) contributes to the signal. We combine Planck/HFI and SPT data at 220 GHz to constrain the amplitude and shape of the CIB power spectrum and find strong evidence for nonlinear clustering. We explore the SZ results using a variety of cosmological models for the CMB and CIB anisotropies and find them to be robust with one exception: allowing for spatial correlations between the thermal SZ effect and CIB significantly degrades the SZ constraints. Neglecting this potential correlation, we find the thermal SZ power at 150 GHz and ℓ = 3000 to be 3.65 ± 0.69 μK^2, and set an upper limit on the kinetic SZ power to be less than 2.8 μK^2 at 95% confidence. When a correlation between the thermal SZ and CIB is allowed, we constrain a linear combination of thermal and kinetic SZ power: D^(tSZ)_(3000) + 0.5D^(kSZ)_(3000) = 4.60 ± 0.63 μK^2, consistent with earlier measurements. We use the measured thermal SZ power and an analytic, thermal SZ model calibrated with simulations to determine σ_8 = 0.807 ± 0.016. Modeling uncertainties involving the astrophysics of the intracluster medium rather than the statistical uncertainty in the measured band powers are the dominant source of uncertainty on σ_8. We also place an upper limit on the kinetic SZ power produced by patchy reionization; a companion paper uses these limits to constrain the reionization history of the universe

Lattice dynamics and electron-phonon coupling in Sr2RuO4

The lattice dynamics in Sr$_2$RuO$_4$ has been studied by inelastic neutron scattering combined with shell-model calculations. The in-plane bond-stretching modes in Sr$_2$RuO$_4$ exhibit a normal dispersion in contrast to all electronically doped perovskites studied so far. Evidence for strong electron phonon coupling is found for c-polarized phonons suggesting a close connection with the anomalous c-axis charge transport in Sr$_2$RuO$_4$.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures 2 table

Stability of graph communities across time scales

The complexity of biological, social and engineering networks makes it desirable to find natural partitions into communities that can act as simplified descriptions and provide insight into the structure and function of the overall system. Although community detection methods abound, there is a lack of consensus on how to quantify and rank the quality of partitions. We show here that the quality of a partition can be measured in terms of its stability, defined in terms of the clustered autocovariance of a Markov process taking place on the graph. Because the stability has an intrinsic dependence on time scales of the graph, it allows us to compare and rank partitions at each time and also to establish the time spans over which partitions are optimal. Hence the Markov time acts effectively as an intrinsic resolution parameter that establishes a hierarchy of increasingly coarser clusterings. Within our framework we can then provide a unifying view of several standard partitioning measures: modularity and normalized cut size can be interpreted as one-step time measures, whereas Fiedler's spectral clustering emerges at long times. We apply our method to characterize the relevance and persistence of partitions over time for constructive and real networks, including hierarchical graphs and social networks. We also obtain reduced descriptions for atomic level protein structures over different time scales.Comment: submitted; updated bibliography from v

Proof of the Double Bubble Conjecture in R^n

The least-area hypersurface enclosing and separating two given volumes in R^n is the standard double bubble.Comment: 20 pages, 22 figure

Impact of Many-Body Effects on Landau Levels in Graphene

We present magneto-Raman spectroscopy measurements on suspended graphene to investigate the charge carrier density-dependent electron-electron interaction in the presence of Landau levels. Utilizing gate-tunable magneto-phonon resonances, we extract the charge carrier density dependence of the Landau level transition energies and the associated effective Fermi velocity $v_\mathrm{F}$. In contrast to the logarithmic divergence of $v_\mathrm{F}$ at zero magnetic field, we find a piecewise linear scaling of $v_\mathrm{F}$ as a function of charge carrier density, due to a magnetic field-induced suppression of the long-range Coulomb interaction. We quantitatively confirm our experimental findings by performing tight-binding calculations on the level of the Hartree-Fock approximation, which also allow us to estimate an excitonic binding energy of $\approx$ 6 meV contained in the experimentally extracted Landau level transitions energies.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Mixture models and exploratory analysis in networks

Networks are widely used in the biological, physical, and social sciences as a concise mathematical representation of the topology of systems of interacting components. Understanding the structure of these networks is one of the outstanding challenges in the study of complex systems. Here we describe a general technique for detecting structural features in large-scale network data which works by dividing the nodes of a network into classes such that the members of each class have similar patterns of connection to other nodes. Using the machinery of probabilistic mixture models and the expectation-maximization algorithm, we show that it is possible to detect, without prior knowledge of what we are looking for, a very broad range of types of structure in networks. We give a number of examples demonstrating how the method can be used to shed light on the properties of real-world networks, including social and information networks.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, two new examples in this version plus minor correction

Eigenlevel statistics of the quantum adiabatic algorithm

We study the eigenlevel spectrum of quantum adiabatic algorithm for 3-satisfiability problem, focusing on single-solution instances. The properties of the ground state and the associated gap, crucial for determining the running time of the algorithm, are found to be far from the predictions of random matrix theory. The distribution of gaps between the ground and the first excited state shows an abundance of small gaps. Eigenstates from the central part of the spectrum are, on the other hand, well described by random matrix theory.Comment: 8 pages, 10 ps figure

On fault-tolerance with noisy and slow measurements

It is not so well-known that measurement-free quantum error correction protocols can be designed to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing. Despite the potential advantages of using such protocols in terms of the relaxation of accuracy, speed and addressing requirements on the measurement process, they have usually been overlooked because they are expected to yield a very bad threshold as compared to error correction protocols which use measurements. Here we show that this is not the case. We design fault-tolerant circuits for the 9 qubit Bacon-Shor code and find a threshold for gates and preparation of $p_{(p,g) thresh}=3.76 \times 10^{-5}$ (30% of the best known result for the same code using measurement based error correction) while admitting up to 1/3 error rates for measurements and allocating no constraints on measurement speed. We further show that demanding gate error rates sufficiently below the threshold one can improve the preparation threshold to $p_{(p)thresh} = 1/3$. We also show how these techniques can be adapted to other Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. v3 has an extended exposition and several simplifications that provide for an improved threshold value and resource overhea