Systematic ranging and late warning asteroid impacts

We describe systematic ranging, an orbit determination technique especially suitable to assess the near-term Earth impact hazard posed by newly discovered asteroids. For these late warning cases, the time interval covered by the observations is generally short, perhaps a few hours or even less, which leads to severe degeneracies in the orbit estimation process. The systematic ranging approach gets around these degeneracies by performing a raster scan in the poorly-constrained space of topocentric range and range rate, while the plane of sky position and motion are directly tied to the recorded observations. This scan allows us to identify regions corresponding to collision solutions, as well as potential impact times and locations. From the probability distribution of the observation errors, we obtain a probability distribution in the orbital space and then estimate the probability of an Earth impact. We show how this technique is effective for a number of examples, including 2008 TC3 and 2014 AA, the only two asteroids to date discovered prior to impact

A Single Atom Transistor in a 1D Optical Lattice

We propose a scheme utilising a quantum interference phenomenon to switch the transport of atoms in a 1D optical lattice through a site containing an impurity atom. The impurity represents a qubit which in one spin state is transparent to the probe atoms, but in the other acts as a single atom mirror. This allows a single-shot quantum non-demolition measurement of the qubit spin.Comment: RevTeX 4, 5 Figures, 4 Page

A Single Atom Mirror for 1D Atomic Lattice Gases

We propose a scheme utilizing quantum interference to control the transport of atoms in a 1D optical lattice by a single impurity atom. The two internal state of the impurity represent a spin-1/2 (qubit), which in one spin state is perfectly transparent to the lattice gas, and in the other spin state acts as a single atom mirror, confining the lattice gas. This allows to ``amplify'' the state of the qubit, and provides a single-shot quantum non-demolition measurement of the state of the qubit. We derive exact analytical expression for the scattering of a single atom by the impurity, and give approximate expressions for the dynamics a gas of many interacting bosonic of fermionic atoms.Comment: 20 pages, 15 figure

Universal rates for reactive ultracold polar molecules in reduced dimensions

Analytic expressions describe universal elastic and reactive rates of quasi-two-dimensional and quasi-one-dimensional collisions of highly reactive ultracold molecules interacting by a van der Waals potential. Exact and approximate calculations for the example species of KRb show that stability and evaporative cooling can be realized for spin-polarized fermions at moderate dipole and trapping strength, whereas bosons or unlike fermions require significantly higher dipole or trapping strengths.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Recent pace of change in human impact on the world's ocean.

Humans interact with the oceans in diverse and profound ways. The scope, magnitude, footprint and ultimate cumulative impacts of human activities can threaten ocean ecosystems and have changed over time, resulting in new challenges and threats to marine ecosystems. A fundamental gap in understanding how humanity is affecting the oceans is our limited knowledge about the pace of change in cumulative impact on ocean ecosystems from expanding human activities - and the patterns, locations and drivers of most significant change. To help address this, we combined high resolution, annual data on the intensity of 14 human stressors and their impact on 21 marine ecosystems over 11 years (2003-2013) to assess pace of change in cumulative impacts on global oceans, where and how much that pace differs across the ocean, and which stressors and their impacts contribute most to those changes. We found that most of the ocean (59%) is experiencing significantly increasing cumulative impact, in particular due to climate change but also from fishing, land-based pollution and shipping. Nearly all countries saw increases in cumulative impacts in their coastal waters, as did all ecosystems, with coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves at most risk. Mitigation of stressors most contributing to increases in overall cumulative impacts is urgently needed to sustain healthy oceans

Quantum Communication in Spin Systems With Long-Range Interactions

We calculate the fidelity of transmission of a single qubit between distant sites on semi-infinite and finite chains of spins coupled via the magnetic dipole interaction. We show that such systems often perform better than their Heisenberg nearest-neighbour coupled counterparts, and that fidelities closely approaching unity can be attained between the ends of finite chains without any special engineering of the system, although state transfer becomes slow in long chains. We discuss possible optimization methods, and find that, for any length, the best compromise between the quality and the speed of the communication is obtained in a nearly uniform chain of 4 spins.Comment: 15 pages, 8 eps figures, updated references, corrected text and corrected figs. 1, 4 and

Probing nn-Spin Correlations in Optical Lattices

We propose a technique to measure multi-spin correlation functions of arbitrary range as determined by the ground states of spinful cold atoms in optical lattices. We show that an observation of the atomic version of the Stokes parameters, using focused lasers and microwave pulsing, can be related to $n$-spin correlators. We discuss the possibility of detecting not only ground state static spin correlations, but also time-dependent spin wave dynamics as a demonstrative example using our proposed technique.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Label free biosensor for screening estrogenic activity

Estrogens and estrogen mimics prevalent in aquatic environment are of great environmental concern because of their endocrine disrupting and carcinogenic activities. Looking to the wide variety of natural as well as structurally different synthetic estrogen mimics, a reliable in-vitro assay is required for screening the estrogenic activity of endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs). Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is one of the most promising analytical tools to monitor the high-performance biomolecular interactions in a label free, real time format. Present paper demonstrates a facile SPR based affinity bioassay employing estrogen receptor-a, human (hERa) functionalized self assembled monolayer covalently bound onto the gold sensor chip as recognition species. A successful interaction of potential estrogen mimics with estrogen receptor is evidenced by net rise in SPR angle. The assay has been validated in terms of optimum experimental conditions and specificity with estrogen as a positive control showing maximum estrogenic activity. As a proof of concept, proposed affinity assay is tested for screening the estrogenic activity of progesterone, pregnenolone, tamoxifen, and bisphenol-A as representative examples of potential EDCs of different classes