15,775 research outputs found
Vacuum fluctuations of a scalar field near a reflecting boundary and their effects on the motion of a test particle
The contribution from quantum vacuum fluctuations of a real massless scalar
field to the motion of a test particle that interacts with the field in the
presence of a perfectly reflecting flat boundary is here investigated. There is
no quantum induced dispersions on the motion of the particle when it is alone
in the empty space. However, when a reflecting wall is introduced, dispersions
occur with magnitude dependent on how fast the system evolves between the two
scenarios. A possible way of implementing this process would be by means of an
idealized sudden switching, for which the transition occurs instantaneously.
Although the sudden process is a simple and mathematically convenient
idealization it brings some divergences to the results, particularly at a time
corresponding to a round trip of a light signal between the particle and the
wall. It is shown that the use of smooth switching functions, besides
regularizing such divergences, enables us to better understand the behavior of
the quantum dispersions induced on the motion of the particle. Furthermore, the
action of modifying the vacuum state of the system leads to a change in the
particle energy that depends on how fast the transition between these states is
implemented. Possible implications of these results to the similar case of an
electric charge near a perfectly conducting wall are discussed.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure
Parallel structurally-symmetric sparse matrix-vector products on multi-core processors
We consider the problem of developing an efficient multi-threaded
implementation of the matrix-vector multiplication algorithm for sparse
matrices with structural symmetry. Matrices are stored using the compressed
sparse row-column format (CSRC), designed for profiting from the symmetric
non-zero pattern observed in global finite element matrices. Unlike classical
compressed storage formats, performing the sparse matrix-vector product using
the CSRC requires thread-safe access to the destination vector. To avoid race
conditions, we have implemented two partitioning strategies. In the first one,
each thread allocates an array for storing its contributions, which are later
combined in an accumulation step. We analyze how to perform this accumulation
in four different ways. The second strategy employs a coloring algorithm for
grouping rows that can be concurrently processed by threads. Our results
indicate that, although incurring an increase in the working set size, the
former approach leads to the best performance improvements for most matrices.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figures, reviewed related work section, fixed typo
Accelerated Non-Reciprocal Transfer of Energy Around an Exceptional Point
We develop perturbative methods to study and control dynamical phenomena related to exceptional points in Non-Hermitian systems. In particular, we show how to find perturbative solutions based on the Magnus expansion that accurately describe the evolution of non-Hermitian systems when encircling an exceptional point. This allows us to use the recently proposed Magnus-based strategy for control to design fast non-reciprocal, topological operations whose fidelity error is orders of magnitude smaller than their much slower adiabatic counterparts
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