Measuring a transmon qubit in circuit QED: dressed squeezed states

Using circuit QED, we consider the measurement of a superconducting transmon qubit via a coupled microwave resonator. For ideally dispersive coupling, ringing up the resonator produces coherent states with frequencies matched to transmon energy states. Realistic coupling is not ideally dispersive, however, so transmon-resonator energy levels hybridize into joint eigenstate ladders of the Jaynes-Cummings type. Previous work has shown that ringing up the resonator approximately respects this ladder structure to produce a coherent state in the eigenbasis (a dressed coherent state). We numerically investigate the validity of this coherent state approximation to find two primary deviations. First, resonator ring-up leaks small stray populations into eigenstate ladders corresponding to different transmon states. Second, within an eigenstate ladder the transmon nonlinearity shears the coherent state as it evolves. We then show that the next natural approximation for this sheared state in the eigenbasis is a dressed squeezed state, and derive simple evolution equations for such states using a hybrid phase-Fock-space description.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures; v2 published versio

On the H\'enon-Lane-Emden conjecture

We consider Liouville-type theorems for the following H\'{e}non-Lane-Emden system \hfill -\Delta u&=& |x|^{a}v^p \text{in} \mathbb{R}^N, \hfill -\Delta v&=& |x|^{b}u^q \text{in} \mathbb{R}^N, when $pq>1$, $p,q,a,b\ge0$. The main conjecture states that there is no non-trivial non-negative solution whenever $(p,q)$ is under the critical Sobolev hyperbola, i.e. $\frac{N+a}{p+1}+\frac{N+b}{q+1}>{N-2}$. We show that this is indeed the case in dimension N=3 provided the solution is also assumed to be bounded, extending a result established recently by Phan-Souplet in the scalar case. Assuming stability of the solutions, we could then prove Liouville-type theorems in higher dimensions. For the scalar cases, albeit of second order ($a=b$ and $p=q$) or of fourth order ($a\ge 0=b$ and $p>1=q$), we show that for all dimensions $N\ge 3$ in the first case (resp., $N\ge 5$ in the second case), there is no positive solution with a finite Morse index, whenever $p$ is below the corresponding critical exponent, i.e $1<p<\frac{N+2+2a}{N-2}$ (resp., $1<p<\frac{N+4+2a}{N-4}$). Finally, we show that non-negative stable solutions of the full H\'{e}non-Lane-Emden system are trivial provided \label{sysdim00} N<2+2(\frac{p(b+2)+a+2}{pq-1}) (\sqrt{\frac{pq(q+1)}{p+1}}+ \sqrt{\frac{pq(q+1)}{p+1}-\sqrt\frac{pq(q+1)}{p+1}}).Comment: Theorem 4 has been added in the new version. 23 pages, Comments are welcome. Updated version - if any - can be downloaded at http://www.birs.ca/~nassif/ or http://www.math.ubc.ca/~fazly/research.htm

Complete Genome Sequence of Aneurinibacillus migulanus E1, a Gramicidin S- and d-Phenylalanyl-l-Propyl Diketopiperazine-Deficient Mutant

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work was supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme grant 245268 (ISEFOR; to L.B.). Further support came from the SwissBOL project (the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, to L.B.) and the Sciex-Scientific Exchange Programme NMS.CH (to L.L. and L.B.).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

POSSIBLE IMPACTS OF ICT BASED DEMAND-RESPONSIVE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION SCHEMES IN THE FREE STATE

Published Conference ProceedingsReliability and accessibility of public transportation are major concerns. ICT based demand responsive schemes can be the ultimate solution to these problems. Even though Demand Responsive Transportation solutions have always been conventional for cabs to meet individual traveller’s needs, they have not been used for buses and mini-bus taxis in the Free State. Therefore, they can be considered to provide reliable and flexible transportation to meet the public’s momentary transportation needs at affordable rates using taxis and buses. Current accessibility problems like long walking distance to bus stops and long waiting times can be solved using demand responsive schemes and cheaper demand based minibus taxi or bus services would reduce the use of expensive cabs. This would reduce public transportation reliability, accessibility, affordability and efficiency problems, but might not have the same impact on operators and public transportation users. The benefits they might have on public transportation users could lead to immediate or long-term consequences for the operators. This paper aims at evaluating the possible impacts of using ICT based technologies and applications for demand responsive public transportation in the Free State province and how they may impact public transportation operators and users in terms of dead mileage, travel times, intensity of demand in different areas and acceptance of these schemes by the public and operators

Maximum Resilience of Artificial Neural Networks

The deployment of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in safety-critical applications poses a number of new verification and certification challenges. In particular, for ANN-enabled self-driving vehicles it is important to establish properties about the resilience of ANNs to noisy or even maliciously manipulated sensory input. We are addressing these challenges by defining resilience properties of ANN-based classifiers as the maximal amount of input or sensor perturbation which is still tolerated. This problem of computing maximal perturbation bounds for ANNs is then reduced to solving mixed integer optimization problems (MIP). A number of MIP encoding heuristics are developed for drastically reducing MIP-solver runtimes, and using parallelization of MIP-solvers results in an almost linear speed-up in the number (up to a certain limit) of computing cores in our experiments. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our approach by means of computing maximal resilience bounds for a number of ANN benchmark sets ranging from typical image recognition scenarios to the autonomous maneuvering of robots.Comment: Timestamp research work conducted in the project. version 2: fix some typos, rephrase the definition, and add some more existing wor

Antibody response to hepatitis b immunization in Egyptian children with sickle cell disease

Background: Despite improvement in the safety of blood products, sickle cell disease (SCD) and thalassemic patients are at greater risk than the general population for hepatitis B infection and chronic liver disease, making hepatitis B immunization especially important for this population. This study was conducted to evaluate and follow up the antibody response to hepatitis B vaccination, in patients with SCD, after 1-15 years of vaccination. Methods: participants were 30 SCD and 30 thalassemic patients attending the Hematology Department, Children’s Hospital, Cairo University as well as 30 ages and sex matched normal controls. They were subjected to clinical evaluation, complete blood count, and measurement of liver transaminases, serum bilirubin, and serum ferritin levels as well as estimation of anti-HBs titer by enzymatic immunoassay. Results: Anti-HBs titers in SCD patients ranged between 5.6 and 381 IU/L (54.83 ± 15.30), while the levels of thalassemic patients ranged between 16 and 343 IU/L (93.4 ± 30) and those of the control group ranged from 10 to 523 IU/L (83.4 ± 28.1) which revealed statistically significant decrease in SCD patients compared to thalassemic and healthy controls (p =0.0317). Out of the 30 SCD patients, 40% showed anti-HBs titer below 10 IU/L (non-protective titer), while none of the thalassemic patients or the control group revealed the same. Achievement of a protective titer had no correlation with sex, consanguinity, or any of the clinical or laboratory data tested. Conclusion: Immune dysfunction in thalassemia is not playing a major role in response to hepatitis B vaccination. However, SCD children should have their anti-HBs titer measured after routine hepatitis B immunization to ensure that they achieved protective titer, then after 1 year of vaccination and repeated every 5 years and those who do not seroconvert should receive additional doses. Booster HBV vaccination of unprotected SCD patients seems mandatory.Keywords: sickle cell, immunity, hepatitis B, immunizationEgypt J Pediatr Allergy Immunol 2010;8(2):67-7

Blood Transfusion in Patients with Sickle Cell Disease Requiring Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Laparoscopic cholecystectomy in patients with sickle cell disease was found to be safe without preoperative blood transfusion