60 research outputs found
Minor parties and independents in times of change: Scottish local elections 1974 to 2007
This article explores the electoral performance of minor party and Independent candidates in Scottish local elections from 1974 to 2007. This is a period which began with a major restructuring of local government and ended with a change in the electoral system from first-past-the-post to the single transferable vote. It encompasses a second restructuring in the 1990s, the consolidation of the Scottish National Party as an electoral force, and the creation of the Scottish Parliament. Throughout the period, while there have been ebbs and flows, Independents and minor parties have remained significant players in local electoral politics in Scotland
More on ghost condensation in Yang-Mills theory: BCS versus Overhauser effect and the breakdown of the Nakanishi-Ojima annex SL(2,R) symmetry
We analyze the ghost condensates ,
and in Yang-Mills theory in the Curci-Ferrari gauge. By
combining the local composite operator formalism with the algebraic
renormalization technique, we are able to give a simultaneous discussion of
, and , which
can be seen as playing the role of the BCS, respectively Overhauser effect in
ordinary superconductivity. The Curci-Ferrari gauge exhibits a global
continuous symmetry generated by the Nakanishi-Ojima (NO) algebra. This algebra
includes, next to the (anti-)BRST transformation, a SL(2,R) subalgebra. We
discuss the dynamical symmetry breaking of the NO algebra through these ghost
condensates. Particular attention is paid to the Landau gauge, a special case
of the Curci-Ferrari gauge.Comment: 33 pages, 2 eps figures. v2: version published in JHEP, author added,
error in potential corrected. Results and conclusions unchange
Decoherence induced deformation of the ground state in adiabatic quantum computation
Despite more than a decade of research on adiabatic quantum computation
(AQC), its decoherence properties are still poorly understood. Many theoretical
works have suggested that AQC is more robust against decoherence, but a
quantitative relation between its performance and the qubits' coherence
properties, such as decoherence time, is still lacking. While the thermal
excitations are known to be important sources of errors, they are predominantly
dependent on temperature but rather insensitive to the qubits' coherence. Less
understood is the role of virtual excitations, which can also reduce the ground
state probability even at zero temperature. Here, we introduce normalized
ground state fidelity as a measure of the decoherence-induced deformation of
the ground state due to virtual transitions. We calculate the normalized
fidelity perturbatively at finite temperatures and discuss its relation to the
qubits' relaxation and dephasing times, as well as its projected scaling
properties.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
Experimental investigation of classical and quantum correlations under decoherence
It is well known that many operations in quantum information processing
depend largely on a special kind of quantum correlation, that is, entanglement.
However, there are also quantum tasks that display the quantum advantage
without entanglement. Distinguishing classical and quantum correlations in
quantum systems is therefore of both fundamental and practical importance. In
consideration of the unavoidable interaction between correlated systems and the
environment, understanding the dynamics of correlations would stimulate great
interest. In this study, we investigate the dynamics of different kinds of
bipartite correlations in an all-optical experimental setup. The sudden change
in behaviour in the decay rates of correlations and their immunity against
certain decoherences are shown. Moreover, quantum correlation is observed to be
larger than classical correlation, which disproves the early conjecture that
classical correlation is always greater than quantum correlation. Our
observations may be important for quantum information processing.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Nature Communication
Quantum Discord and entropic measures of quantum correlations: Optimization and behavior in finite spin chains
We discuss a generalization of the conditional entropy and one-way
information deficit in quantum systems, based on general entropic forms. The
formalism allows to consider simple entropic forms for which a closed
evaluation of the associated optimization problem in qudit-qubit systems is
shown to become feasible, allowing to approximate that of the quantum discord.
As application, we examine quantum correlations of spin pairs in the exact
ground state of finite spin chains in a magnetic field through the quantum
discord and information deficit. While these quantities show a similar
behavior, their optimizing measurements exhibit significant differences, which
can be understood and predicted through the previous approximations. The
remarkable behavior of these quantities in the vicinity of transverse and
non-transverse factorizing fields is also discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
Quantum Correlations in NMR systems
In conventional NMR experiments, the Zeeman energy gaps of the nuclear spin
ensembles are much lower than their thermal energies, and accordingly exhibit
tiny polarizations. Generally such low-purity quantum states are devoid of
quantum entanglement. However, there exist certain nonclassical correlations
which can be observed even in such systems. In this chapter, we discuss three
such quantum correlations, namely, quantum contextuality, Leggett-Garg temporal
correlations, and quantum discord. In each case, we provide a brief theoretical
background and then describe some results from NMR experiments.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure
The sudden change phenomenon of quantum discord
Even if the parameters determining a system's state are varied smoothly, the
behavior of quantum correlations alike to quantum discord, and of its classical
counterparts, can be very peculiar, with the appearance of non-analyticities in
its rate of change. Here we review this sudden change phenomenon (SCP)
discussing some important points related to it: Its uncovering,
interpretations, and experimental verifications, its use in the context of the
emergence of the pointer basis in a quantum measurement process, its appearance
and universality under Markovian and non-Markovian dynamics, its theoretical
and experimental investigation in some other physical scenarios, and the
related phenomenon of double sudden change of trace distance discord. Several
open questions are identified, and we envisage that in answering them we will
gain significant further insight about the relation between the SCP and the
symmetry-geometric aspects of the quantum state space.Comment: Lectures on General Quantum Correlations and their Applications, F.
F. Fanchini, D. O. Soares Pinto, and G. Adesso (Eds.), Springer (2017), pp
309-33
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