12,364 research outputs found
Designing defect-based qubit candidates in wide-gap binary semiconductors for solid-state quantum technologies
The development of novel quantum bits is key to extend the scope of
solid-state quantum information science and technology. Using first-principles
calculations, we propose that large metal ion - vacancy complexes are promising
qubit candidates in two binary crystals: 4H-SiC and w-AlN. In particular, we
found that the formation of neutral Hf- and Zr-vacancy complexes is
energetically favorable in both solids; these defects have spin-triplet ground
states, with electronic structures similar to those of the diamond NV center
and the SiC di-vacancy. Interestingly, they exhibit different spin-strain
coupling characteristics, and the nature of heavy metal ions may allow for easy
defect implantation in desired lattice locations and ensure stability against
defect diffusion. In order to support future experimental identification of the
proposed defects, we report predictions of their optical zero-phonon line,
zero-field splitting and hyperfine parameters. The defect design concept
identified here may be generalized to other binary semiconductors to facilitate
the exploration of new solid-state qubits.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures, 6 tables, Supplementary Information is added at
the en
A New Statistic for Analyzing Baryon Acoustic Oscillations
We introduce a new statistic omega_l for measuring and analyzing large-scale
structure and particularly the baryon acoustic oscillations. omega_l is a
band-filtered, configuration space statistic that is easily implemented and has
advantages over the traditional power spectrum and correlation function
estimators. Unlike these estimators, omega_l can localize most of the acoustic
information into a single dip at the acoustic scale while also avoiding
sensitivity to the poorly constrained large scale power (i.e., the integral
constraint) through the use of a localized and compensated filter. It is also
sensitive to anisotropic clustering through pair counting and does not require
any binning. We measure the shift in the acoustic peak due to nonlinear effects
using the monopole omega_0 derived from subsampled dark matter catalogues as
well as from mock galaxy catalogues created via halo occupation distribution
(HOD) modeling. All of these are drawn from 44 realizations of 1024^3 particle
dark matter simulations in a 1h^{-1}Gpc box at z=1. We compare these shifts
with those obtained from the power spectrum and conclude that the results
agree. This indicates that any distance measurements obtained from omega_0 and
P(k) will be consistent with each other. We also show that it is possible to
extract the same amount of acoustic information using either omega_0 or P(k)
from equal volume surveys.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. ApJ accepted. Edit: Now updated with final
accepted versio
Distance, Growth Factor, and Dark Energy Constraints from Photometric Baryon Acoustic Oscillation and Weak Lensing Measurements
Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) and weak lensing (WL) are complementary
probes of cosmology. We explore the distance and growth factor measurements
from photometric BAO and WL techniques and investigate the roles of the
distance and growth factor in constraining dark energy. We find for WL that the
growth factor has a great impact on dark energy constraints but is much less
powerful than the distance. Dark energy constraints from WL are concentrated in
considerably fewer distance eigenmodes than those from BAO, with the largest
contributions from modes that are sensitive to the absolute distance. Both
techniques have some well determined distance eigenmodes that are not very
sensitive to the dark energy equation of state parameters w_0 and w_a,
suggesting that they can accommodate additional parameters for dark energy and
for the control of systematic uncertainties. A joint analysis of BAO and WL is
far more powerful than either technique alone, and the resulting constraints on
the distance and growth factor will be useful for distinguishing dark energy
and modified gravity models. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will
yield both WL and angular BAO over a sample of several billion galaxies. Joint
LSST BAO and WL can yield 0.5% level precision on ten comoving distances evenly
spaced in log(1+z) between redshift 0.3 and 3 with cosmic microwave background
priors from Planck. In addition, since the angular diameter distance, which
directly affects the observables, is linked to the comoving distance solely by
the curvature radius in the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric solution, LSST
can achieve a pure metric constraint of 0.017 on the mean curvature parameter
Omega_k of the universe simultaneously with the constraints on the comoving
distances.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, details and references added, ApJ accepte
Reexamination of silicon effects on rice growth and production under field conditions using a low silicon mutant
Silicon (Si) is a beneficial element for healthy growth and high and sustainable production of rice, but the mode of action of the beneficial effects has not been well understood. We carried out field trials for four years at two different locations to re-examine the effects of Si on the growth and production of rice using a low silicon rice (lsi1) mutant. The mutant accumulated much lower Si at each growth stage compared with the wild-type rice (Oryza sativa L. cv Oochikara), but there was no difference in the accumulation of other nutrients including N, P, and K. Measurements at different growth stages showed that low Si in the mutant hardly affected the tiller number, chlorophyll content (SPAD value), and root growth. The plant height and shoot dry weight of the wild-type rice were slightly higher than those of the mutant at a later growth stage, but the difference was not significant between the two lines. However, grain yield was reduced by 79-98%, depending on year, due to a low Si accumulation in the mutant, which showed the largest effect of Si on rice production among all studies reported so far. Among the yield components, the percentage of filled spikelets was mostly affected, being only 13.9% of the wild-type rice in the mutant. The grain color of the mutant became brown because of excessive transpiration and infection of pathogens. These results indicate that Si increases rice yield mainly by enhancing the fertility of spikelets.</p
Measuring D_A and H at z=0.35 from the SDSS DR7 LRGs using baryon acoustic oscillations
We present measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A(z) and the
Hubble parameter H(z) at z=0.35 using the anisotropy of the baryon acoustic
oscillation (BAO) signal measured in the galaxy clustering distribution of the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7) Luminous Red Galaxies
(LRG) sample. Our work is the first to apply density-field reconstruction to an
anisotropic analysis of the acoustic peak. Reconstruction partially removes the
effects of non-linear evolution and redshift-space distortions in order to
sharpen the acoustic signal. We present the theoretical framework behind the
anisotropic BAO signal and give a detailed account of the fitting model we use
to extract this signal from the data. Our method focuses only on the acoustic
peak anisotropy, rather than the more model-dependent anisotropic information
from the broadband power. We test the robustness of our analysis methods on 160
LasDamas DR7 mock catalogues and find that our models are unbiased at the ~0.2%
level in measuring the BAO anisotropy. After reconstruction we measure
D_A(z=0.35)=1050+/-38 Mpc and H(z=0.35)=84.4+/-7.0 km/s/Mpc assuming a sound
horizon of r_s=152.76 Mpc. Note that these measurements are correlated with a
correlation coefficient of 0.58. This represents a factor of 1.4 improvement in
the error on D_A relative to the pre-reconstruction case; a factor of 1.2
improvement is seen for H.Comment: 30 pages, 21 figures, accepted by MNRAS, updated to version accepted
by journa
Assembly and force measurement with SPM-like probes in holographic optical tweezers
We report a high fidelity tomographic reconstruction of the quantum state of photon pairs generated by parametric down-conversion with orbital angular momentum (OAM) entanglement. Our tomography method allows us to estimate an upper and lower bound for the entanglement between the down-converted photons. We investigate the two-dimensional state subspace defined by the OAM states ±â and superpositions thereof, with â=1, 2, ..., 30. We find that the reconstructed density matrix, even for OAMs up to around â=20, is close to that of a maximally entangled Bell state with a fidelity in the range between F=0.979 and F=0.814. This demonstrates that, although the single count-rate diminishes with increasing â, entanglement persists in a large dimensional state space
On Savitzky-Golay filtering for online condition monitoring of transformer on-load tap changer
Vibro-acoustic measurement on a transformer's on-load tap changer (OLTC) can provide indications on its mechanical condition. Recently, a joint vibro-acoustic and arcing measurement system has been proposed, which can correlate the vibro-acoustic signal to mechanical events of OLTC's operation. However, there are still considerable difficulties in extracting useful information from both vibro-acoustic signal and arcing signal in a synchronized manner without any distortions in the extracted signals. In this paper, Savitzky-Golay filter is introduced to process the signals acquired from a joint vibro-acoustic and arcing measurement system installed on in-service OLTCs. It proves that the Savitzky-Golay filter can process both vibro-acoustic and arcing signals induced by OLTC, extract essential information without any time delay from both types of signals, and retrieve voltage phase information from the arcing signal. The methodologies developed in this paper can improve the visibility of OLTC's mechanical operation for an effective online condition monitoring
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