How Oxytocin Receptor (OXTR) Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms Act on Prosociality: The Mediation Role of Moral Evaluation

Prosociality is related to numerous positive outcomes, and mechanisms underlying individual differences in prosociality have been widely discussed. Recently, research has found converging evidence on the influence of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene on prosociality. Meanwhile, moral reasoning, a key precursor for social behavior, has also been associated with variability in OXTR gene, thus the relationship between OXTR and prosociality is assumed to be mediated by moral evaluation. The current study examines the relationship in question, and includes gender as a potential moderator. Self-reported prosociality on Prosocial Tendencies Measure and evaluation on the moral acceptability of behaviors in stories from 790 Chinese adolescents (32.4% boys) were analyzed for the influence of their OXTR single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Results showed that SNP at site rs2254298 was indirectly associated with prosocial behaviors via moral evaluation of behaviors, and this effect was moderated by gender. Our findings suggest an indirect association between genetic variations in OXTR and prosociality through moral evaluation, indicating the potential pathway from genetic variability to prosociality through level of moral development. We also provide some evidence that the role of oxytocin system may to some extent depend on gender. These findings may promote our understanding of the genetic and biological roots of prosociality and morality.National Natural Science Foundation of China [31371040, 31571134, 31170995, J1103602]SSCIARTICLE

Entangling two oscillators with arbitrary asymmetric initial states

A Hamiltonian is presented, which can be used to convert any asymmetric state $|\varphi \rangle_{a}|\phi \rangle_{b}$ of two oscillators $a$ and $b$ into an entangled state. Furthermore, with this Hamiltonian and local operations only, two oscillators, initially in any asymmetric initial states, can be entangled with a third oscillator. The prepared entangled states can be engineered with an arbitrary degree of entanglement. A discussion on the realization of this Hamiltonian is given. Numerical simulations show that, with current circuit QED technology, it is feasible to generate high-fidelity entangled states of two microwave optical fields, such as entangled coherent states, entangled squeezed states, entangled coherent-squeezed states, and entangled cat states. Our finding opens a new avenue for creating not only two-color or three-color entanglement of light but also wave-like or particle-like entanglement or novel wave-like and particle-like hybrid entanglement.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Generating entanglement between microwave photons and qubits in multiple cavities coupled by a superconducting qutrit

We discuss how to generate entangled coherent states of four \textrm{microwave} resonators \textrm{(a.k.a. cavities)} coupled by a superconducting qubit. We also show \textrm{that} a GHZ state of four superconducting qubits embedded in four different resonators \textrm{can be created with this scheme}. In principle, \textrm{the proposed method} can be extended to create an entangled coherent state of $n$ resonators and to prepare a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state of $n$ qubits distributed over $n$ cavities in a quantum network. In addition, it is noted that four resonators coupled by a coupler qubit may be used as a basic circuit block to build a two-dimensional quantum network, which is useful for scalable quantum information processing.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Generation of GHZ entangled states of photons in multiple cavities via a superconducting qutrit or an atom through resonant interaction

We propose an efficient method to generate a GHZ entangled state of n photons in n microwave cavities (or resonators) via resonant interaction to a single superconducting qutrit. The deployment of a qutrit, instead of a qubit, as the coupler enables us to use resonant interactions exclusively for all qutrit-cavity and qutrit-pulse operations. This unique approach significantly shortens the time of operation which is advantageous to reducing the adverse effects of qutrit decoherence and cavity decay on fidelity of the protocol. Furthermore, the protocol involves no measurement on either the state of qutrit or cavity photons. We also show that the protocol can be generalized to other systems by replacing the superconducting qutrit coupler with different types of physical qutrit, such as an atom in the case of cavity QED, to accomplish the same task.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev.

MA2QL: A Minimalist Approach to Fully Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Decentralized learning has shown great promise for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, non-stationarity remains a significant challenge in decentralized learning. In the paper, we tackle the non-stationarity problem in the simplest and fundamental way and propose \textit{multi-agent alternate Q-learning} (MA2QL), where agents take turns to update their Q-functions by Q-learning. MA2QL is a \textit{minimalist} approach to fully decentralized cooperative MARL but is theoretically grounded. We prove that when each agent guarantees a $\varepsilon$-convergence at each turn, their joint policy converges to a Nash equilibrium. In practice, MA2QL only requires minimal changes to independent Q-learning (IQL). We empirically evaluate MA2QL on a variety of cooperative multi-agent tasks. Results show MA2QL consistently outperforms IQL, which verifies the effectiveness of MA2QL, despite such minimal changes

Dual Effects of the US-China Trade War and COVID-19 on United States Imports: Transfer of China's industrial chain?

The trade tension between the U.S. and China since 2018 has caused a steady decoupling of the world's two largest economies. The pandemic outbreak in 2020 complicated this process and had numerous unanticipated repercussions. This paper investigates how U.S. importers reacted to the trade war and worldwide lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine the effects of the two incidents on U.S. imports separately and collectively, with various economic scopes. Our findings uncover intricate trading dynamics among the U.S., China, and Southeast Asia, through which businesses relocated portions of their global supply chain away from China to avoid high tariffs. Our analysis indicates that increased tariffs cause the U.S. to import less from China. Meanwhile, Southeast Asian exporters have integrated more into value chains centered on Chinese suppliers by participating more in assembling and completing products. However, the worldwide lockdowns over pandemic have reversed this trend as, over this period, the U.S. effectively imported more goods directly from China and indirectly through Southeast Asian exporters that imported from China.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figure

Single-step transfer or exchange of multipartite quantum entanglement with minimum resources

The transfer or exchange of multipartite quantum states is critical to the realization of large-scale quantum information processing and quantum communication. A challenging question in this context is: What is the minimum resource required and how to simultaneously transfer or exchange multipartite quantum entanglement between two sets of qubits. Finding the answer to these questions is of great importance to quantum information science. In this work, we demonstrate that by using a single quantum two-level system - the simplest quantum object - as a coupler arbitrary multipartite quantum states (either entangled or separable) can be transferred or exchanged simultaneously between two sets of qubits. Our findings offer the potential to significantly reduce the resources needed to construct and operate large-scale quantum information networks consisting of many multi-qubit registers, memory cells, and processing units.Comment: 45 pages, 7 figure

Entangling two oscillators with arbitrary asymmetric initial states

We present a Hamiltonian which can be used to convert any asymmetric state |φ⟩a|ϕ⟩b of two oscillators a and b into an entangled state via a single-step operation. Furthermore, with this Hamiltonian and only local operations, two oscillators, initially in any asymmetric initial states, can be entangled with a third oscillator. The prepared entangled states can be engineered with an arbitrary degree of entanglement. A discussion of the realization of this Hamiltonian is given. Numerical simulations show that, with current circuit QED technology, it is feasible to generate high-fidelity entangled states of two microwave optical fields, such as entangled coherent states, entangled squeezed states, entangled coherent-squeezed states, and entangled cat states. Our finding opens a avenue for creating not only wavelike or particlelike entanglement but also wavelike and particlelike hybrid entanglemen

Coupled superconducting qudit-resonator system: Energy spectrum, state population, and state transition under microwave drive

Superconducting quantum multilevel systems coupled to resonators have recently been considered in some applications such as microwave lasing and high-fidelity quantum logical gates. In this work, using an rf-SQUID type phase qudit coupled to a microwave coplanar waveguide resonator, we study both theoretically and experimentally the energy spectrum of the system when the qudit level spacings are varied around the resonator frequency by changing the magnetic flux applied to the qudit loop. We show that the experimental result can be well described by a theoretical model that extends from the usual two-level Jaynes-Cummings system to the present four-level system. It is also shown that due to the small anharmonicity of the phase device a simplified model capturing the leading state interactions fits the experimental spectra very well. Furthermore we use the Lindblad master equation containing various relaxation and dephasing processes to calculate the level populations in the simpler qutrit-resonator system, which allows a clear understanding of the dynamics of the system under the microwave drive. Our results help to better understand and perform the experiments of coupled multilevel and resonator systems and can be applied in the case of transmon or Xmon qudits having similar anharmonicity to the present phase device.This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grants No. 2014CB921202, No. 2015CB921104, and No. 2016YFA0300601),the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 91321208 and No. 11674380)the Key Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDPB08-3)S.H. acknowledges support by the US NSF (PHY-1314861)