AC electrokinetic phenomena over semiconductive surfaces: effective electric boundary conditions and their applications

Electrokinetic boundary conditions are derived for AC electrokinetic (ACEK) phenomena over leaky dielectric (i.e., semiconducting) surfaces. Such boundary conditions correlate the electric potentials across the semiconductor-electrolyte interface (consisting of the electric double layer (EDL) inside the electrolyte solutions and the space charge layer (SCL) inside the semiconductors) under AC electric fields with arbitrary wave forms. The present electrokinetic boundary conditions allow for evaluation of induced zeta potential contributed by both bond charges (due to electric polarization) and free charges (due to electric conduction) from the leaky dielectric materials. Subsequently, we demonstrate the applications of these boundary conditions in analyzing the ACEK phenomena around a semiconducting cylinder. It is concluded that the flow circulations exist around the semiconducting cylinder and are shown to be stronger under an AC field with lower frequency and around a cylinder with higher conductivity.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figure

Author Correction: Salt concentration and charging velocity determine ion charge storage mechanism in nanoporous supercapacitors

Correction to: Nature Communications; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06612-4; published online 08 October 2018 The original version of this Article contained an error in the Acknowledgements, which was incorrectly omitted from the end of the following: ‘The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme under grant agreement nº 730872.’ This has been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article

Remote state preparation and teleportation in phase space

Continuous variable remote state preparation and teleportation are analyzed using Wigner functions in phase space. We suggest a remote squeezed state preparation scheme between two parties sharing an entangled twin beam, where homodyne detection on one beam is used as a conditional source of squeezing for the other beam. The scheme works also with noisy measurements, and provide squeezing if the homodyne quantum efficiency is larger than 50%. Phase space approach is shown to provide a convenient framework to describe teleportation as a generalized conditional measurement, and to evaluate relevant degrading effects, such the finite amount of entanglement, the losses along the line, and the nonunit quantum efficiency at the sender location.Comment: 2 figures, revised version to appear in J.Opt.

Information criteria for efficient quantum state estimation

Recently several more efficient versions of quantum state tomography have been proposed, with the purpose of making tomography feasible even for many-qubit states. The number of state parameters to be estimated is reduced by tentatively introducing certain simplifying assumptions on the form of the quantum state, and subsequently using the data to rigorously verify these assumptions. The simplifying assumptions considered so far were (i) the state can be well approximated to be of low rank, or (ii) the state can be well approximated as a matrix product state. We add one more method in that same spirit: we allow in principle any model for the state, using any (small) number of parameters (which can, e.g., be chosen to have a clear physical meaning), and the data are used to verify the model. The proof that this method is valid cannot be as strict as in above-mentioned cases, but is based on well-established statistical methods that go under the name of "information criteria." We exploit here, in particular, the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). We illustrate the method by simulating experiments on (noisy) Dicke states

Scaling in many-body systems and proton structure function

The observation of scaling in processes in which a weakly interacting probe delivers large momentum ${\bf q}$ to a many-body system simply reflects the dominance of incoherent scattering off target constituents. While a suitably defined scaling function may provide rich information on the internal dynamics of the target, in general its extraction from the measured cross section requires careful consideration of the nature of the interaction driving the scattering process. The analysis of deep inelastic electron-proton scattering in the target rest frame within standard many-body theory naturally leads to the emergence of a scaling function that, unlike the commonly used structure functions $F_1$ and $F_2$, can be directly identified with the intrinsic proton response.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories, Manchester, UK, July 9-13 200

Quantum state engineering assisted by entanglement

We suggest a general scheme for quantum state engineering based on conditional measurements carried out on entangled twin-beam of radiation. Realistic detection schemes such as {\sc on/off} photodetection, homodyne detection and joint measurement of two-mode quadratures are analyzed in details. Imperfections of the apparatuses, such as nonunit quantum efficiency and finite resolution, are taken into account. We show that conditional {\sc on/off} photodetection provides a reliable scheme to verify nonclassicality, whereas conditional homodyning represents a tunable and robust source of squeezed light. We also describe optical teleportation as a conditional measurement, and evaluate the degrading effects of finite amount of entanglement, decoherence due to losses, and nonunit quantum efficiency.Comment: Some pics with low resolution. Originals at http://www.qubit.i

Bayesian estimation of one-parameter qubit gates

We address estimation of one-parameter unitary gates for qubit systems and seek for optimal probes and measurements. Single- and two-qubit probes are analyzed in details focusing on precision and stability of the estimation procedure. Bayesian inference is employed and compared with the ultimate quantum limits to precision, taking into account the biased nature of Bayes estimator in the non asymptotic regime. Besides, through the evaluation of the asymptotic a posteriori distribution for the gate parameter and the comparison with the results of Monte Carlo simulated experiments, we show that asymptotic optimality of Bayes estimator is actually achieved after a limited number of runs. The robustness of the estimation procedure against fluctuations of the measurement settings is investigated and the use of entanglement to improve the overall stability of the estimation scheme is also analyzed in some details.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Tracking the structural arrangement of ions in carbon supercapacitor nanopores using in situ small-angle X-ray scattering

The charge storage mechanism and ion arrangement inside electrically charged carbon nanopores is a very active research field with tremendous importance for advanced electrochemical technologies, such as supercapacitors or capacitive deionization. Going far beyond the state of art, we present for the first time a comprehensive study of tracking ion electrosorption in aqueous electrolytes during charging and discharging of porous carbon electrodes using in situ X-ray scattering. We provide novel and quantitative insights into the local concentration of anions and cations and demonstrate that the global number of ions within the pores does not vary during charging and discharging. In addition, we have unique access to the spatial arrangement of ions inside carbon nanopores by using a simple, yet powerful two-phase model. Applying this model to our data, we show that double-layer formation is accomplished by a unique combination of preferred counter-ion adsorption directly at the pore wall which drains ions from their local surrounding inside carbon nanopores. Effectively, this leads to a situation which globally appears as ion swapping