Exposure to “real life” professional experiences through a shadowing scheme that matches penultimate and final year students with employers

This paper reports on a learning development project undertaken during 2010 – 2011. The Work-Shadowing Scheme (WSS) was primarily developed in response to feedback following the National Student Survey (NSS). The NSS brought to light the apparent discrepancy between, the number of structured programmes City University London host that offer exposure within professional environments (for example, formal placement schemes) and the number of students looking for experience within a professional context. In an attempt to bridge this gap, the Career and Skills Development Service began thinking about how to implement a scheme that would provide City students with a unique opportunity to gain professional experience across a variety of industries. The WSS project was designed to provide students with the opportunity to shadow a guide from a sector of their choice. Typically, students requested to shadow guides in industries associated with their course, however an additional benefit of the WSS was the potential to shadow a guide within a sector that was not traditionally associated with their degree. On completion of a shadowing experience, students were given the option to shadow two more employers. This aspect of the scheme was further commended, and students reiterated the benefits of gaining „snapshots‟ of multiple sectors before making crucial career decisions

Entanglement in a second order quantum phase transition

We consider a system of mutually interacting spin 1/2 embedded in a transverse magnetic field which undergo a second order quantum phase transition. We analyze the entanglement properties and the spin squeezing of the ground state and show that, contrarily to the one-dimensional case, a cusp-like singularity appears at the critical point $\lambda_c$, in the thermodynamic limit. We also show that there exists a value $\lambda_0 \geq \lambda_c$ above which the ground state is not spin squeezed despite a nonvanishing concurrence.Comment: 4 pages, 4 EPS figures, minor corrections added and title change

Detection of deuterium Balmer lines in the Orion Nebula

The detection and first identification of the deuterium Balmer emission lines, D-alpha and D-beta, in the core of the Orion Nebula is reported. Observations were conducted at the 3.6m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, using the Echelle spectrograph Gecko. These lines are very narrow and have identical 11 km/s velocity shifts with respect to H-alpha and H-beta. They are probably excited by UV continuum fluorescence from the Lyman (DI) lines and arise from the interface between the HII region and the molecular cloud.Comment: 4 pages, latex, 1 figure, 1 table, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, Letter

Comment on "High Field Studies of Superconducting Fluctuations in High-Tc Cuprates. Evidence for a Small Gap distinct from the Large Pseudogap"

By using high magnetic field data to estimate the background conductivity, Rullier-Albenque and coworkers have recently published [Phys.Rev.B 84, 014522 (2011)] experimental evidence that the in-plane paraconductivity in cuprates is almost independent of doping. In this Comment we also show that, in contrast with their claims, these useful data may be explained at a quantitative level in terms of the Gaussian-Ginzburg-Landau approach for layered superconductors, extended by Carballeira and coworkers to high reduced-temperatures by introducing a total-energy cutoff [Phys.Rev.B 63, 144515 (2001)]. When combined, these two conclusions further suggest that the paraconductivity in cuprates is conventional, i.e., associated with fluctuating superconducting pairs above the mean-field critical temperature.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur

On the energy saved by interlayer interactions in the superconducting state of cuprates

A Ginzburg-Landau-like functional is proposed reproducing the main low-energy features of various possible high-Tc superconducting mechanisms involving energy savings due to interlayer interactions. The functional may be used to relate these savings to experimental quantities. Two examples are given, involving the mean-field specific heat jump at Tc and the superconducting fluctuations above Tc. Comparison with existing data suggests, e.g., that the increase of Tc due to the so-called interlayer tunneling (ILT) mechanism of interlayer kinetic-energy savings is negligible in optimally-doped Bi-2212.Comment: 12 pages, no figures. Version history: 21-aug-2003, first version (available on http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0308423v1); 15-jan-2004, update to match Europhys. Lett. publication (minor grammar changes, updates in bibliography - e.g., refs. 5 and 26

Phase diagram of an extended quantum dimer model on the hexagonal lattice

We introduce a quantum dimer model on the hexagonal lattice that, in addition to the standard three-dimer kinetic and potential terms, includes a competing potential part counting dimer-free hexagons. The zero-temperature phase diagram is studied by means of quantum Monte Carlo simulations, supplemented by variational arguments. It reveals some new crystalline phases and a cascade of transitions with rapidly changing flux (tilt in the height language). We analyze perturbatively the vicinity of the Rokhsar-Kivelson point, showing that this model has the microscopic ingredients needed for the "devil's staircase" scenario [E. Fradkin et al., Phys. Rev. B 69, 224415 (2004)], and is therefore expected to produce fractal variations of the ground-state flux.Comment: Published version. 5 pages + 8 (Supplemental Material), 31 references, 10 color figure

Simulation of time evolution with the MERA

We describe an algorithm to simulate time evolution using the Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (MERA) and test it by studying a critical Ising chain with periodic boundary conditions and with up to L ~ 10^6 quantum spins. The cost of a simulation, which scales as L log(L), is reduced to log(L) when the system is invariant under translations. By simulating an evolution in imaginary time, we compute the ground state of the system. The errors in the ground state energy display no evident dependence on the system size. The algorithm can be extended to lattice systems in higher spatial dimensions.Comment: final version with data improvement (precision and size), 4.1 pages, 4 figures + extra on X