3,932 research outputs found
Global Governance and the Limits of Health Security
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has exposed the limits of the current approach to the global governance of infectious diseases, which mixes public health and security interests. International efforts to strengthen ‘health security’ quickly faltered when confronted with weak national health systems. Costly attempts by Western governments to strengthen global health security by developing new medical countermeasures, though important, did not yield a single, effective, widely available treatment or vaccine before the outbreak occurred. The World Health Organization (WHO), which had made strengthening global health security a strategic objective, was unable to marshal a rapid international response to the epidemic due to its institutional structure and recent cutbacks in its outbreak and emergency response department. In the end, governments could only try to get ‘ahead’ of the disease via a heavily militarised response that came too late for the thousands who have already died, that remains of uncertain sustainability, and that raises profound challenges for already stretched armed forces. The time has come to move from a focus on health security and international crisis response, to a system of global governance capable of addressing infectious disease outbreaks in an orderly, organised and sustainable manner.UK Department for International Developmen
Elliptical orbits in the Bloch sphere
As is well known, when an SU(2) operation acts on a two-level system, its
Bloch vector rotates without change of magnitude. Considering a system composed
of two two-level systems, it is proven that for a class of nonlocal
interactions of the two subsystems including \sigma_i\otimes\sigma_j (with i,j
\in {x,y,z}) and the Heisenberg interaction, the geometric description of the
motion is particularly simple: each of the two Bloch vectors follows an
elliptical orbit within the Bloch sphere. The utility of this result is
demonstrated in two applications, the first of which bears on quantum control
via quantum interfaces. By employing nonunitary control operations, we extend
the idea of controllability to a set of points which are not necessarily
connected by unitary transformations. The second application shows how the
orbit of the coherence vector can be used to assess the entangling power of
Heisenberg exchange interaction.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, few corrections, J. Opt. B: Quantum Semiclass.
Opt. 7 (2005) S1-S
Arithmetical Congruence Preservation: from Finite to Infinite
Various problems on integers lead to the class of congruence preserving
functions on rings, i.e. functions verifying divides for all
. We characterized these classes of functions in terms of sums of rational
polynomials (taking only integral values) and the function giving the least
common multiple of . The tool used to obtain these
characterizations is "lifting": if is a surjective morphism,
and a function on a lifting of is a function on such that
. In this paper we relate the finite and infinite notions
by proving that the finite case can be lifted to the infinite one. For -adic
and profinite integers we get similar characterizations via lifting. We also
prove that lattices of recognizable subsets of are stable under inverse
image by congruence preserving functions
Pattern formation in quantum Turing machines
We investigate the iteration of a sequence of local and pair unitary
transformations, which can be interpreted to result from a Turing-head
(pseudo-spin ) rotating along a closed Turing-tape ( additional
pseudo-spins). The dynamical evolution of the Bloch-vector of , which can be
decomposed into primitive pure state Turing-head trajectories, gives
rise to fascinating geometrical patterns reflecting the entanglement between
head and tape. These machines thus provide intuitive examples for quantum
parallelism and, at the same time, means for local testing of quantum network
dynamics.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys.Rev.A, 3 figures, REVTEX fil
Multipartite entanglement in fermionic systems via a geometric measure
We study multipartite entanglement in a system consisting of
indistinguishable fermions. Specifically, we have proposed a geometric
entanglement measure for N spin-1/2 fermions distributed over 2L modes (single
particle states). The measure is defined on the 2L qubit space isomorphic to
the Fock space for 2L single particle states. This entanglement measure is
defined for a given partition of 2L modes containing m >= 2 subsets. Thus this
measure applies to m <= 2L partite fermionic system where L is any finite
number, giving the number of sites. The Hilbert spaces associated with these
subsets may have different dimensions. Further, we have defined the local
quantum operations with respect to a given partition of modes. This definition
is generic and unifies different ways of dividing a fermionic system into
subsystems. We have shown, using a representative case, that the geometric
measure is invariant under local unitaries corresponding to a given partition.
We explicitly demonstrate the use of the measure to calculate multipartite
entanglement in some correlated electron systems. To the best of our knowledge,
there is no usable entanglement measure of m > 3 partite fermionic systems in
the literature, so that this is the first measure of multipartite entanglement
for fermionic systems going beyond the bipartite and tripartite cases.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figure
Tight lower bound to the geometric measure of quantum discord
Dakic, Vedral and Brukner [Physical Review Letters \tf{105},190502 (2010)]
gave a geometric measure of quantum discord in a bipartite quantum state as the
distance of the state from the closest classical quantum (or zero discord)
state and derived an explicit formula for a two qubit state. Further, S.Luo and
S.Fu [Physical Review A \tf{82}, 034302 (2010)] obtained a generic form of this
geometric measure for a general bipartite state and established a lower bound.
In this brief report we obtain a rigorous lower bound to the geometric measure
of quantum discord in a general bipartite state which dominates that obtained
by S.Luo and S.Fu.Comment: 10 pages,2 figures. In the previous versions, a constraint was
ignored while optimizing the second term in Eq.(5), in which case, only a
lower bound on the geometric discord can be obtained. The title is also
consequently changed. Accepted in Phys.Rev.
WHO must remain a strong global health leader post Ebola
The final published version is available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60012-
Entanglement Capacity of Nonlocal Hamiltonians : A Geometric Approach
We develop a geometric approach to quantify the capability of creating
entanglement for a general physical interaction acting on two qubits. We use
the entanglement measure proposed by us for -qubit pure states (PRA
\textbf{77}, 062334 (2008)). Our procedure reproduces the earlier results (PRL
\textbf{87}, 137901 (2001)). The geometric method has the distinct advantage
that it gives an experimental way to monitor the process of optimizing
entanglement production.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure
Securing circulation pharmaceutically: antiviral stockpiling and pandemic preparedness in the European Union
Governments in Europe and around the world amassed vast pharmaceutical stockpiles in anticipation of a potentially catastrophic influenza pandemic. Yet the comparatively ‘mild’ course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic provoked considerable public controversy around those stockpiles, leading to questions about their cost–benefit profile and the commercial interests allegedly shaping their creation, as well as around their scientific evidence base. So, how did governments come to view pharmaceutical stockpiling as such an indispensable element of pandemic preparedness planning? What are the underlying security rationalities that rapidly rendered antivirals such a desirable option for government planners? Drawing upon an in-depth reading of Foucault’s notion of a ‘crisis of circulation’, this article argues that the rise of pharmaceutical stockpiling across Europe is integral to a governmental rationality of political rule that continuously seeks to anticipate myriad circulatory threats to the welfare of populations – including to their overall levels of health. Novel antiviral medications such as Tamiflu are such an attractive policy option because they could enable governments to rapidly modulate dangerous levels of (viral) circulation during a pandemic, albeit without disrupting all the other circulatory systems crucial for maintaining population welfare. Antiviral stockpiles, in other words, promise nothing less than a pharmaceutical securing of circulation itself
Quantum dense coding over Bloch channels
Dynamics of coded information over Bloch channels is investigated for
different values of the channel's parameters. We show that, the suppressing of
the travelling coded information over Bloch channel can be increased by
decreasing the equilibrium absolute value of information carrier and
consequently decreasing the distilled information by eavesdropper. The amount
of decoded information can be improved by increasing the equilibrium values of
the two qubits and decreasing the ratio between longitudinal and transverse
relaxation times. The robustness of coded information in maximum and partial
entangled states is discussed. It is shown that the maximum entangled states
are more robust than the partial entangled state over this type of channels
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