E. coli elongation factor Tu bound to a GTP analogue displays an open conformation equivalent to the GDP-bound form

According to the traditional view, GTPases act as molecular switches, which cycle between distinct ‘on’ and ‘off’ conformations bound to GTP and GDP, respectively. Translation elongation factor EF-Tu is a GTPase essential for prokaryotic protein synthesis. In its GTP-bound form, EF-Tu delivers aminoacylated tRNAs to the ribosome as a ternary complex. GTP hydrolysis is thought to cause the release of EF-Tu from aminoacyl-tRNA and the ribosome due to a dramatic conformational change following Pi release. Here, the crystal structure of Escherichia coli EF-Tu in complex with a non-hydrolysable GTP analogue (GDPNP) has been determined. Remarkably, the overall conformation of EF-Tu·GDPNP displays the classical, open GDP-bound conformation. This is in accordance with an emerging view that the identity of the bound guanine nucleotide is not ‘locking’ the GTPase in a fixed conformation. Using a single molecule approach, the conformational dynamics of various ligand-bound forms of EF-Tu were probed in solution by fluorescence resonance energy transfer. The results suggest that EF-Tu, free in solution, may sample a wider set of conformations than the structurally well-defined GTP- and GDP-forms known from previous X-ray crystallographic studies. Only upon binding, as a ternary complex, to the mRNA programmed ribosome, is the well-known, closed GTP-bound conformation, observed

Tunnelling Methods and Hawking's radiation: achievements and prospects

The aim of this work is to review the tunnelling method as an alternative description of the quantum radiation from black holes and cosmological horizons. The method is first formulated and discussed for the case of stationary black holes, then a foundation is provided in terms of analytic continuation throughout complex space-time. The two principal implementations of the tunnelling approach, which are the null geodesic method and the Hamilton-Jacobi method, are shown to be equivalent in the stationary case. The Hamilton-Jacobi method is then extended to cover spherically symmetric dynamical black holes, cosmological horizons and naked singularities. Prospects and achievements are discussed in the conclusions.Comment: Topical Review commissioned and accepted for publication by "Classical and Quantum Gravity". 101 pages; 6 figure

Avoidance as a strategy of (not) coping: qualitative interviews with carers of Huntington's Disease patients

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Back reaction, emission spectrum and entropy spectroscopy

Recently, an interesting work, which reformulates the tunneling framework to directly produce the Hawking emission spectrum and entropy spectroscopy in the tunneling picture, has been received a broad attention. However, during the emission process, most related observations have not incorporated the effects of back reaction on the background spacetime, whose derivations are therefore not the desiring results for the real physical process. With this point as a central motivation, in this paper we suitably adapt the \emph{reformulated} tunneling framework so that it can well accommodate the effects of back reaction to produce the Hawking emission spectrum and entropy spectroscopy. Consequently, we interestingly find that, when back reaction is considered, the Parikh-Wilczek's outstanding observations that, an isolated radiating black hole has an unitary-evolving emission spectrum that is \emph{not} precisely thermal, but is related to the change of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, can also be reproduced in the reformulated tunneling framework, meanwhile the entropy spectrum has the same form as that without inclusion of back reaction, which demonstrates the entropy quantum is \emph{independent} of the effects of back reaction. As our final analysis, we concentrate on the issues of the black hole information, but \emph{unfortunately} find that, even including the effects of back reaction and higher-order quantum corrections, such tunneling formalism can still not provide a mechanism for preserving the black hole information.Comment: 16 pages, no figure, use JHEP3.cls. to be published in JHE

Holographic Calculations of Renyi Entropy

We extend the approach of Casini, Huerta and Myers to a new calculation of the Renyi entropy of a general CFT in d dimensions with a spherical entangling surface, in terms of certain thermal partition functions. We apply this approach to calculate the Renyi entropy in various holographic models. Our results indicate that in general, the Renyi entropy will be a complicated nonlinear function of the central charges and other parameters which characterize the CFT. We also exhibit the relation between this new thermal calculation and a conventional calculation of the Renyi entropy where a twist operator is inserted on the spherical entangling surface. The latter insight also allows us to calculate the scaling dimension of the twist operators in the holographic models.Comment: 71 pages, 6 figure

Entanglement entropies in free fermion gases for arbitrary dimension

We study the entanglement entropy of connected bipartitions in free fermion gases of N particles in arbitrary dimension d. We show that the von Neumann and Renyi entanglement entropies grow asymptotically as N^(1-1/d) ln N, with a prefactor that is analytically computed using the Widom conjecture both for periodic and open boundary conditions. The logarithmic correction to the power-law behavior is related to the area-law violation in lattice free fermions. These asymptotic large-N behaviors are checked against exact numerical calculations for N-particle systems.Comment: 6 pages, 9 fig

Sample-efficient verification of continuously-parameterized quantum gates for small quantum processors

Most near-term quantum information processing devices will not be capable of implementing quantum error correction and the associated logical quantum gate set. Instead, quantum circuits will be implemented directly using the physical native gate set of the device. These native gates often have a parameterization (e.g., rotation angles) which provide the ability to perform a continuous range of operations. Verification of the correct operation of these gates across the allowable range of parameters is important for gaining confidence in the reliability of these devices. In this work, we demonstrate a procedure for sample-efficient verification of continuously-parameterized quantum gates for small quantum processors of up to approximately 10 qubits. This procedure involves generating random sequences of randomly-parameterized layers of gates chosen from the native gate set of the device, and then stochastically compiling an approximate inverse to this sequence such that executing the full sequence on the device should leave the system near its initial state. We show that fidelity estimates made via this technique have a lower variance than fidelity estimates made via cross-entropy benchmarking. This provides an experimentally-relevant advantage in sample efficiency when estimating the fidelity loss to some desired precision. We describe the experimental realization of this technique using continuously-parameterized quantum gate sets on a trapped-ion quantum processor from Sandia QSCOUT and a superconducting quantum processor from IBM Q, and we demonstrate the sample efficiency advantage of this technique both numerically and experimentally

Hawking Radiation and Tunneling Mechanism for a New Class of Black Holes in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet Gravity

We study the Hawking radiation in a new class of black hole solutions in the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory. The black hole has been argued to have vanishing mass and entropy, but finite Hawking temperature. To check if it really emits radiation, we analyse the Hawking radiation using the original method of quantization of scalar field in the black hole background and the quantum tunneling method, and confirm that it emits radiation at the Hawking temperature. A general formula is derived for the Hawking temperature and backreaction in the tunneling approach. Physical implications of these results are discussed.Comment: 12 pages, v2: Title slightly changed. Motivation and discussions are elaborated, v3: typos corrected to match the published versio