Status of Salerno Laboratory (Measurements in Nuclear Emulsion)

A report on the analysis work in the Salerno Emulsion Laboratory is presented. It is related to the search for nu_mu->nu_tau oscillations in CHORUS experiment, the calibrations in the WANF (West Area Neutrino Facility) at Cern and tests and preparation for new experiments.Comment: Proc. The First International Workshop of Nuclear Emulsion Techniques (12-24 June 1998, Nagoya, Japan), 15 pages, 11 figure

Improving the Efficiency of Quantum Circuits for Information Set Decoding

The NIST Post-Quantum standardization initiative, that entered its fourth round, aims to select asymmetric cryptosystems secure against attacker equipped with a quantum computer. Code-based cryptosystems are a promising option for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), as neither classical nor quantum algorithms provide polynomial time solvers for its underlying hard problems. Indeed, to provide sound alternatives to lattice-based cryptosystems, NIST advanced all round 3 code-based cryptosystems to round 4. We present a complete implementation of a quantum circuit based on the Information Set Decoding (ISD) strategy, the best known one against code-based cryptosystems, providing quantitative measures for the security margin achieved with respect to the quantum-accelerated key recovery on AES, targeting both the current state-of-the-art approach and the NIST estimates. Our work improves the state-of-the-art, reducing the circuit depth from 2¹⁹ to 2³⁰ for all the parameters of the NIST selected cryptosystems. We further analyse recently proposed optimizations, showing that the overhead introduced by their implementation overcomes their asymptotic advantages. Finally, we address the concern brought forward in the latest NIST report on the parameters choice for the McEliece cryptosystem, showing that the parameter choice yields a computational effort which is slightly below the required target level

Affective Contagion: How Attitudes Expressed by Others Influence Our Perception of Actions

Vitality forms represent a fundamental aspect of social interactions by characterizing how actions are performed and how words are pronounced on the basis of the attitude of the agent. Same action, such as a handshake, may have a different impact on the receiver when it is performed kindly or vigorously, and similarly, a gentle or rude tone of voice may have a different impact on the listener. In the present study, we carried out two experiments that aimed to investigate whether and how vocal requests conveying different vitality forms can influence the perception of goal-directed actions and to measure the duration of this effect over time. More specifically, participants were asked to listen to the voice of an actor pronouncing “give me” in a rude or gentle way. Then, they were asked to observe the initial part of a rude or a gentle passing action, continue it mentally, and estimate the time of its completion. Results showed that the perception of different vitality forms expressed by vocal requests influenced the estimation of action duration. Moreover, we found that this effect was limited to a certain time interval (800 ms), after which it started to decay