A low-loss, broadband antenna for efficient photon collection from a coherent spin in diamond

We report the creation of a low-loss, broadband optical antenna giving highly directed output from a coherent single spin in the solid-state. The device, the first solid-state realization of a dielectric antenna, is engineered for individual nitrogen vacancy (NV) electronic spins in diamond. We demonstrate a directionality close to 10. The photonic structure preserves the high spin coherence of single crystal diamond (T2>100us). The single photon count rate approaches a MHz facilitating efficient spin readout. We thus demonstrate a key enabling technology for quantum applications such as high-sensitivity magnetometry and long-distance spin entanglement.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures and supplementary information (5 pages, 8 figures). Comments welcome. Further information under http://www.quantum-sensing.physik.unibas.c

London Creative and Digital Fusion

date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000The London Creative and Digital Fusion programme of interactive, tailored and in-depth support was designed to support the UK capital’s creative and digital companies to collaborate, innovate and grow. London is a globally recognised hub for technology, design and creative genius. While many cities around the world can claim to be hubs for technology entrepreneurship, London’s distinctive potential lies in the successful fusion of world-leading technology with world-leading design and creativity. As innovation thrives at the edge, where better to innovate than across the boundaries of these two clusters and cultures? This booklet tells the story of Fusion’s innovation journey, its partners and its unique business support. Most importantly of all it tells stories of companies that, having worked with London Fusion, have innovated and grown. We hope that it will inspire others to follow and build on our beginnings.European Regional Development Fund 2007-13

Towards machine-assisted meta-studies: the Hubble constant

We present an approach for automatic extraction of measured values from the astrophysical literature, using the Hubble constant for our pilot study. Our rules-based model – a classical technique in natural language processing – has successfully extracted 298 measurements of the Hubble constant, with uncertainties, from the 208 541 available arXiv astrophysics papers. We have also created an artificial neural network classifier to identify papers in arXiv which report novel measurements. From the analysis of our results we find that reporting measurements with uncertainties and the correct units is critical information when distinguishing novel measurements in free text. Our results correctly highlight the current tension for measurements of the Hubble constant and recover the 3.5σ discrepancy – demonstrating that the tool presented in this paper is useful for meta-studies of astrophysical measurements from a large number of publications

Multi-color live-cell STED nanoscopy of mitochondria with a gentle inner membrane stain

Capturing mitochondria's intricate and dynamic structure poses a daunting challenge for optical nanoscopy. Different labeling strategies have been demonstrated for live-cell stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy of mitochondria, but orthogonal strategies are yet to be established, and image acquisition has suffered either from photodamage to the organelles or from rapid photobleaching. Therefore, live-cell nanoscopy of mitochondria has been largely restricted to 2D single-color recordings of cancer cells. Here, by conjugation of cyclooctatetraene to a benzo-fused cyanine dye, we report a mitochondrial inner-membrane (IM) fluorescent marker, PK Mito Orange (PKMO), featuring efficient STED at 775 nm, strong photostability and markedly reduced phototoxicity. PKMO enables super-resolution recordings of inner-membrane dynamics for extended periods in immortalized mammalian cell lines, primary cells, and organoids. Photostability and reduced phototoxicity of PKMO open the door to live-cell 3D STED nanoscopy of mitochondria for three-dimensional analysis of the convoluted IM. PKMO is optically orthogonal with green and far-red markers allowing multiplexed recordings of mitochondria using commercial STED microscopes. Using multi-color STED, we demonstrate that imaging with PKMO can capture the sub- mitochondrial localization of proteins, or interactions of mitochondria with different cellular components, such as the ER or the cytoskeleton at sub-100 nm resolution. Thereby, this work offers a versatile tool for studying mitochondrial inner-membrane architecture and dynamics in a multiplexed manner

Strange quark matter: mapping QCD lattice results to finite baryon density by a quasi-particle model

A quasi-particle model is presented which describes QCD lattice results for the 0, 2 and 4 quark-flavor equation of state. The results are mapped to finite baryo-chemical potentials. As an application of the model we make a prediction of deconfined matter with appropriate inclusion of strange quarks and consider pure quark stars.Comment: invited talk at Strangeness 2000, Berkeley; prepared version for the proceedings, 5 page

Language Models as Knowledge Bases?

Recent progress in pretraining language models on large textual corpora led to a surge of improvements for downstream NLP tasks. Whilst learning linguistic knowledge, these models may also be storing relational knowledge present in the training data, and may be able to answer queries structured as "fill-in-the-blank" cloze statements. Language models have many advantages over structured knowledge bases: they require no schema engineering, allow practitioners to query about an open class of relations, are easy to extend to more data, and require no human supervision to train. We present an in-depth analysis of the relational knowledge already present (without fine-tuning) in a wide range of state-of-the-art pretrained language models. We find that (i) without fine-tuning, BERT contains relational knowledge competitive with traditional NLP methods that have some access to oracle knowledge, (ii) BERT also does remarkably well on open-domain question answering against a supervised baseline, and (iii) certain types of factual knowledge are learned much more readily than others by standard language model pretraining approaches. The surprisingly strong ability of these models to recall factual knowledge without any fine-tuning demonstrates their potential as unsupervised open-domain QA systems. The code to reproduce our analysis is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LAMA

Respiratory symptoms in preterm infants: burden of disease in the first year of life

OBJECTIVE: While respiratory symptoms in the first year of life are relatively well described for term infants, data for preterm infants are scarce. We aimed to describe the burden of respiratory disease in a group of preterm infants with and without bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) and to assess the association of respiratory symptoms with perinatal, genetic and environmental risk factors. METHODS: Single centre birth cohort study: prospective recording of perinatal risk factors and retrospective assessment of respiratory symptoms during the first year of life by standardised questionnaires. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Cough and wheeze (common symptoms), re-hospitalisation and need for inhalation therapy (severe outcomes). PATIENTS: 126 preterms (median gestational age 28.7 weeks; 78 with, 48 without BPD) hospitalised at the University Children's Hospital of Bern, Switzerland 1999-2006. RESULTS: Cough occurred in 80%, wheeze in 44%, re-hospitalisation in 25% and long term inhalation therapy in wheezers in 13% of the preterm infants. Using logistic regression, the main risk factor for common symptoms was frequent contact with other children. Severe outcomes were associated with maximal peak inspiratory pressure, arterial cord blood pH, APGAR- and CRIB-Score. CONCLUSIONS: Cough in preterm infants is as common as in term infants, whereas wheeze, inhalation therapy and re-hospitalisations occur more often. Severe outcomes are associated with perinatal risk factors. Preterm infants who did not qualify for BPD according to latest guidelines also showed a significant burden of respiratory disease in the first year of life