A two-state model of twisted intramolecular chargetransfer in monomethine dyes

A two-state model Hamiltonian is proposed to model the coupling of twisting displacements to charge-transfer behavior in the ground and excited states of a general monomethine dye molecule. This coupling may be relevant to the molecular mechanism of environment-dependent fluorescence yield enhancement. The model is parameterized against quantum chemical calculations on different protonation states of the green fluorescent protein chromophore (GFP), which are chosen to sample different regimes of detuning from the cyanine (resonant) limit. The model provides a simple yet realistic description of the charge transfer character along two possible excited state twisting channels associated with the methine bridge. It describes qualitatively different behavior in three regions that can be classified by their relationship to the resonant (cyanine) limit. The regimes differ by the presence or absence of twist-dependent polarization reversal and the occurrence of conical intersections. We find that selective biasing of one twisting channel over another by an applied diabatic biasing potential can only be achieved in a finite range of parameters near the cyanine limit.Comment: 45 pages, 9 Figures (incl. 2 chemical schemes). Accepted for publication by the Journal of Chemical Physics. Changes include 2 additional figures to and expanded discussion of key points felt to be important, and condensed discussion of some points felt to be less importan

Free-flight responses of Drosophila melanogaster to attractive odors

Many motile organisms localize the source of attractive odorants by following plumes upwind. In the case of D. melanogaster, little is known of how individuals alter their flight trajectories after encountering and losing a plume of an attractive odorant. We have characterized the three-dimensional flight behavior of D. melanogaster in a wind tunnel under a variety of odor conditions. In the absence of olfactory cues, hungry flies initiate flight and display anemotactic orientation. Following contact with a narrow ribbon plume of an attractive odor, flies reduce their crosswind velocity while flying faster upwind, resulting in a surge directed toward the odor source. Following loss of odor contact due to plume truncation, flies frequently initiate a stereotyped crosswind casting response, a behavior rarely observed in a continuous odor plume. Similarly, within a homogeneous odor cloud, flies move fast while maintaining an upwind heading. These results indicate both similarities and differences between the behavior of D. melanogaster and the responses of male moths to pheromone plumes, suggesting possible differences in underlying neural mechanisms

Quantum Cryptography II: How to re-use a one-time pad safely even if P=NP

When elementary quantum systems, such as polarized photons, are used to transmit digital information, the uncertainty principle gives rise to novel cryptographic phenomena unachievable with traditional transmission media, e.g. a communications channel on which it is impossible in principle to eavesdrop without a high probability of being detected. With such a channel, a one-time pad can safely be reused many times as long as no eavesdrop is detected, and, planning ahead, part of the capacity of these uncompromised transmissions can be used to send fresh random bits with which to replace the one-time pad when an eavesdrop finally is detected. Unlike other schemes for stretching a one-time pad, this scheme does not depend on complexity-theoretic assumptions such as the difficulty of factoring.Comment: Original 1982 submission to ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing with spelling and typographical corrections, and comments by the authors 32 years later. Submitted to Natural Computin

Sequential importance sampling for multiway tables

We describe an algorithm for the sequential sampling of entries in multiway contingency tables with given constraints. The algorithm can be used for computations in exact conditional inference. To justify the algorithm, a theory relates sampling values at each step to properties of the associated toric ideal using computational commutative algebra. In particular, the property of interval cell counts at each step is related to exponents on lead indeterminates of a lexicographic Gr\"{o}bner basis. Also, the approximation of integer programming by linear programming for sampling is related to initial terms of a toric ideal. We apply the algorithm to examples of contingency tables which appear in the social and medical sciences. The numerical results demonstrate that the theory is applicable and that the algorithm performs well.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053605000000822 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org