SKYWAY '09: Awareness of the Sky/ The Sky as Awareness - International Light Festival, Impressions and Reflections on the Proceedings

Two artists, two astrophysicists, a historian of science, a musician, the Skyway Festival director and the Toruń 2016 director met over two days on the 15th and 16th of August in this beautiful gothic city to discuss the relationship between art and astrophysics. The aim of the sessions was to foster interdisciplinary understanding and achieve a consensus on methods and approaches for future collaborative work and cross-disciplinary production of art, writing and dissemination.Peer reviewe

An attempt at experimental validation of the authoritarianism scale

Honors thesi

Combinatorial Entanglement

We present new combinatorial objects, which we call grid-labelled graphs, and show how these can be used to represent the quantum states arising in a scenario which we refer to as the faulty emitter scenario: we have a machine designed to emit a particular quantum state on demand, but which can make an error and emit a different one. The device is able to produce a list of candidate states which can be used as a kind of debugging information for testing entanglement. By reformulating the Peres-Horodecki and matrix realignment criteria we are able to capture some characteristic features of entanglement: we construct new bound entangled states, and demonstrate the limitations of matrix realignment. We show how the notion of LOCC is related to a generalisation of the graph isomorphism problem. We give a simple proof that asymptotically almost surely, grid-labelled graphs associated to very sparse density matrices are entangled. We develop tools for enumerating grid-labelled graphs that satisfy the Peres-Horodecki criterion up to a fixed number of vertices, and propose various computational problems for these objects, whose complexity remains an open problem. The proposed mathematical framework also suggests new combinatorial and algebraic ways for describing the structure of graphs

Deformations of calibrated subbundles of Euclidean spaces via twisting by special sections

We extend the "bundle constructions" of calibrated submanifolds, due to Harvey--Lawson in the special Lagrangian case, and to Ionel--Karigiannis--Min-Oo in the cases of exceptional calibrations, by "twisting" the bundles by a special (harmonic, holomorphic, parallel) section of a complementary bundle. The existence of such deformations shows that the moduli space of calibrated deformations of these "calibrated subbundles" includes deformations which destroy the linear structure of the fibre.Comment: 16 pages, no figures. Version 2: Only minor cosmetic and typographical revisions. To appear in "Annals of Global Analysis and Geometry.

Spectral and Spin Measurement of Two Small and Fast-Rotating Near-Earth Asteroids

In May 2012 two asteroids made near-miss "grazing" passes at distances of a few Earth-radii: 2012 KP24 passed at nine Earth-radii and 2012 KT42 at only three Earth-radii. The latter passed inside the orbital distance of geosynchronous satellites. From spectral and imaging measurements using NASA's 3-m Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF), we deduce taxonomic, rotational, and physical properties. Their spectral characteristics are somewhat atypical among near-Earth asteroids: C-complex for 2012 KP24 and B-type for 2012 KT42, from which we interpret the albedos of both asteroids to be between 0.10 and 0.15 and effective diameters of 20+-2 and 6+-1 meters, respectively. Among B-type asteroids, the spectrum of 2012 KT42 is most similar to 3200 Phaethon and 4015 Wilson-Harrington. Not only are these among the smallest asteroids spectrally measured, we also find they are among the fastest-spinning: 2012 KP24 completes a rotation in 2.5008+-0.0006 minutes and 2012 KT42 rotates in 3.634+-0.001 minutes.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Icaru

Genralized Robustness of Entanglement

The robustness of entanglement results of Vidal and Tarrach considered the problem whereby an entangled state is mixed with a separable state so that the overall state becomes non-entangled. In general it is known that there are also cases when entangled states are mixed with other entangled states and where the sum is separable. In this paper, we treat the more general case where entangled states can be mixed with any states so that the resulting mixture is unentangled. It is found that entangled pure states for this generalized case have the same robustness as the restricted case of Vidal and Tarrach.Comment: Final version. Editorial changes and references added to independent wor