Current and Future Constraints on Primordial Magnetic Fields

We present new limits on the amplitude of potential primordial magnetic fields (PMFs) using temperature and polarization measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from Planck, BICEP2/Keck Array, POLARBEAR, and SPTpol. We reduce twofold the 95% CL upper limit on the CMB anisotropy power due to a nearly-scale-invariant PMF, with an allowed B-mode power at $\ell=1500$ of $D_{\ell=1500}^{BB} < 0.071 \mu K^2$ for Planck versus $D_{\ell=1500}^{BB} < 0.034 \mu K^2$ for the combined dataset. We also forecast the expected limits from soon-to-deploy CMB experiments (like SPT-3G, Adv. ACTpol, or the Simons Array) and the proposed CMB-S4 experiment. Future CMB experiments should dramatically reduce the current uncertainties, by one order of magnitude for the near-term experiments and two orders of magnitude for the CMB-S4 experiment. The constraints from CMB-S4 have the potential to rule out much of the parameter space for PMFs.Comment: Submitted to ApJ, 10 page

Identification and characterization of a novel extracellular matrix protein nephronectin that is associated with integrin alpha8beta1 in the embryonic kidney.

The epithelial-mesenchymal interactions required for kidney organogenesis are disrupted in mice lacking the integrin alpha8beta1. None of this integrin's known ligands, however, appears to account for this phenotype. To identify a more relevant ligand, a soluble integrin alpha8beta1 heterodimer fused to alkaline phosphatase (AP) has been used to probe blots and cDNA libraries. In newborn mouse kidney extracts, alpha8beta1-AP detects a novel ligand of 70-90 kD. This protein, named nephronectin, is an extracellular matrix protein with five EGF-like repeats, a mucin region containing a RGD sequence, and a COOH-terminal MAM domain. Integrin alpha8beta1 and several additional RGD-binding integrins bind nephronectin. Nephronectin mRNA is expressed in the ureteric bud epithelium, whereas alpha8beta1 is expressed in the metanephric mesenchyme. Nephronectin is localized in the extracellular matrix in the same distribution as the ligand detected by alpha8beta1-AP and forms a complex with alpha8beta1 in vivo. Thus, these results strongly suggest that nephronectin is a relevant ligand mediating alpha8beta1 function in the kidney. Nephronectin is expressed at numerous sites outside the kidney, so it may also have wider roles in development. The approaches used here should be generally useful for characterizing the interactions of novel extracellular matrix proteins identified through genomic sequencing projects

Improved magic states distillation for quantum universality

Given stabilizer operations and the ability to repeatedly prepare a single-qubit mixed state rho, can we do universal quantum computation? As motivation for this question, "magic state" distillation procedures can reduce the general fault-tolerance problem to that of performing fault-tolerant stabilizer circuits. We improve the procedures of Bravyi and Kitaev in the Hadamard "magic" direction of the Bloch sphere to achieve a sharp threshold between those rho allowing universal quantum computation, and those for which any calculation can be efficiently classically simulated. As a corollary, the ability to repeatedly prepare any pure state which is not a stabilizer state (e.g., any single-qubit pure state which is not a Pauli eigenstate), together with stabilizer operations, gives quantum universality. It remains open whether there is also a tight separation in the so-called T direction.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Ein neues, unkompliziert auszuführendes Verfahren zur Bestimmung kleiner Konzentrationen an Wasser in organischen Lösungsmitteln

A new procedure for the determination of water (even in trace amounts) in organic solvents is described. The solvatochromism of the pyridiniumphenol betaine, E T30, determined by a simple UV-absorption measurement, together with a two-parameter equation, permits an exact determination. The procedure is rapid and is, therefore, an alternative to the Karl-Fischer titration

, Calculation of nuclear magnetic resonance shieldings using frozen density embedding

We have extended the frozen-density embedding (FDE) scheme within density-functional theory [T. A. Wesolowski and A. Warshel, J. Phys. Chem. 97, 8050 (1993)] to include external magnetic fields and applied this extension to the nonrelativistic calculation of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) shieldings. This leads to a formulation in which the electron density and the induced current are calculated separately for the individual subsystems. If the current dependence of the exchange-correlation functional and of the nonadditive kinetic-energy functional are neglected, the induced currents in the subsystems are not coupled and each of them can be determined without knowledge of the induced current in the other subsystem. This allows the calculation of the NMR shielding as a sum of contributions of the individual subsystems. As a test application, we have calculated the solvent shifts of the nitrogen shielding of acetonitrile for different solvents using small geometry-optimized clusters consisting of acetonitrile and one solvent molecule. By comparing to the solvent shifts obtained from supermolecular calculations we assess the accuracy of the solvent shifts obtained from FDE calculations. We find a good agreement between supermolecular and FDE calculations for different solvents. In most cases it is possible to neglect the contribution of the induced current in the solvent subsystem to the NMR shielding, but it has to be considered for aromatic solvents. We demonstrate that FDE can describe the effect of induced currents in the environment accurately. © 2006 American Institute of Physics

Exponential complexity of an adiabatic algorithm for an NP-complete problem

We prove an analytical expression for the size of the gap between the ground and the first excited state of quantum adiabatic algorithm for the 3-satisfiability, where the initial Hamiltonian is a projector on the subspace complementary to the ground state. For large problem sizes the gap decreases exponentially and as a consequence the required running time is also exponential.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; v3. published versio

The ground state of a class of noncritical 1D quantum spin systems can be approximated efficiently

We study families H_n of 1D quantum spin systems, where n is the number of spins, which have a spectral gap \Delta E between the ground-state and first-excited state energy that scales, asymptotically, as a constant in n. We show that if the ground state |\Omega_m> of the hamiltonian H_m on m spins, where m is an O(1) constant, is locally the same as the ground state |\Omega_n>, for arbitrarily large n, then an arbitrarily good approximation to the ground state of H_n can be stored efficiently for all n. We formulate a conjecture that, if true, would imply our result applies to all noncritical 1D spin systems. We also include an appendix on quasi-adiabatic evolutions.Comment: 9 pages, 1 eps figure, minor change

Single-qubit unitary gates by graph scattering

We consider the effects of plane-wave states scattering off finite graphs, as an approach to implementing single-qubit unitary operations within the continuous-time quantum walk framework of universal quantum computation. Four semi-infinite tails are attached at arbitrary points of a given graph, representing the input and output registers of a single qubit. For a range of momentum eigenstates, we enumerate all of the graphs with up to $n=9$ vertices for which the scattering implements a single-qubit gate. As $n$ increases, the number of new unitary operations increases exponentially, and for $n>6$ the majority correspond to rotations about axes distributed roughly uniformly across the Bloch sphere. Rotations by both rational and irrational multiples of $\pi$ are found.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure