Strategies for the evolution of sex

We find that the hypothesis made by Jan, Stauffer and Moseley [Theory in Biosc., 119, 166 (2000)] for the evolution of sex, namely a strategy devised to escape extinction due to too many deleterious mutations, is sufficient but not necessary for the successful evolution of a steady state population of sexual individuals within a finite population. Simply allowing for a finite probability for conversion to sex in each generation also gives rise to a stable sexual population, in the presence of an upper limit on the number of deleterious mutations per individual. For large values of this probability, we find a phase transition to an intermittent, multi-stable regime. On the other hand, in the limit of extremely slow drive, another transition takes place to a different steady state distribution, with fewer deleterious mutations within the asexual population.Comment: RevTeX, 11 pages, multicolumn, including 12 figure

Low-temperature heat transfer in nanowires

The new regime of low-temperature heat transfer in suspended nanowires is predicted. It takes place when (i) only ``acoustic'' phonon modes of the wire are thermally populated and (ii) phonons are subject to the effective elastic scattering. Qualitatively, the main peculiarities of heat transfer originate due to appearance of the flexural modes with high density of states in the wire phonon spectrum. They give rise to the $T^{1/2}$ temperature dependence of the wire thermal conductance. The experimental situations where the new regime is likely to be detected are discussed.Comment: RevTex file, 1 PS figur

Low-frequency noise as a source of dephasing of a qubit

With the growing efforts in isolating solid-state qubits from external decoherence sources, the material-inherent sources of noise start to play crucial role. One representative example is electron traps in the device material or substrate. Electrons can tunnel or hop between a charged and an empty trap, or between a trap and a gate electrode. A single trap typically produces telegraph noise and can hence be modeled as a bistable fluctuator. Since the distribution of hopping rates is exponentially broad, many traps produce flicker-noise with spectrum close to 1/f. Here we develop a theory of decoherence of a qubit in the environment consisting of two-state fluctuators, which experience transitions between their states induced by interaction with thermal bath. Due to interaction with the qubit the fluctuators produce 1/f-noise in the qubit's eigenfrequency. We calculate the results of qubit manipulations - free induction and echo signals - in such environment. The main problem is that in many important cases the relevant random process is both non-Markovian and non-Gaussian. Consequently the results in general cannot be represented by pair correlation function of the qubit eigenfrequency fluctuations. Our calculations are based on analysis of the density matrix of the qubit using methods developed for stochastic differential equations. The proper generating functional is then averaged over different fluctuators using the so-called Holtsmark procedure. The analytical results are compared with simulations allowing checking accuracy of the averaging procedure and evaluating mesoscopic fluctuations. The results allow understanding some observed features of the echo decay in Josephson qubits.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, Proc. of NATO/Euresco Conf. "Fundamental Problems of Mesoscopic Physics: Interactions and Decoherence", Granada, Spain, Sept.200

Non-Gaussian dephasing in flux qubits due to 1/f-noise

Recent experiments by F. Yoshihara et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 167001 (2006)] and by K. Kakuyanagi et al. (cond-mat/0609564) provided information on decoherence of the echo signal in Josephson-junction flux qubits at various bias conditions. These results were interpreted assuming a Gaussian model for the decoherence due to 1/f noise. Here we revisit this problem on the basis of the exactly solvable spin-fluctuator model reproducing detailed properties of the 1/f noise interacting with a qubit. We consider the time dependence of the echo signal and conclude that the results based on the Gaussian assumption need essential reconsideration.Comment: Improved fitting parameters, new figur

Lattice QCD with mixed actions

We discuss some of the implications of simulating QCD when the action used for the sea quarks is different from that used for the valence quarks. We present exploratory results for the hadron mass spectrum and pseudoscalar meson decay constants using improved staggered sea quarks and HYP-smeared overlap valence quarks. We propose a method for matching the valence quark mass to the sea quark mass and demonstrate it on UKQCD clover data in the simpler case where the sea and valence actions are the same.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures some minor modification to text and figures. Accepted for publicatio

Non-visual functions of crustacean eyestalk ganglia

Ablation experiments demonstrated that in several crustacean groups, the proximal eyestalk ganglia are important in a variety of behavior patterns: 1. Chemical elicitation of feeding via the antennules is altered in lobsters, hermit crabs, and some brachyuran crabs by bilateral eyestalk ablation; the ablation of one antennule and the contralateral eyestalk is effective in lobsters and hermit crabs;Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47106/1/359_2005_Article_BF01245153.pd

On the statistics of superlocalized states in self-affine disordered potentials

We investigate the statistics of eigenstates in a weak self-affine disordered potential in one dimension, whose Gaussian fluctuations grow with distance with a positive Hurst exponent $H$. Typical eigenstates are superlocalized on samples much larger than a well-defined crossover length, which diverges in the weak-disorder regime. We present a parallel analytical investigation of the statistics of these superlocalized states in the discrete and the continuum formalisms. For the discrete tight-binding model, the effective localization length decays logarithmically with the sample size, and the logarithm of the transmission is marginally self-averaging. For the continuum Schr\"odinger equation, the superlocalization phenomenon has more drastic effects. The effective localization length decays as a power of the sample length, and the logarithm of the transmission is fully non-self-averaging.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure