Stochastic assessment of rocking masonry façades under real seismic records

This contribution assesses in stochastic terms the safety level of masonry façades potentially subjected to out-of-plane loading and the beneficial effect offered by horizontal restraints – such as steel tie rods - under earthquakes. A parametric analysis is performed on façades of different slenderness and size to state their influence on the response in probabilistic terms, showing that velocity and energy based Intensity Measures are optimal since they usually re-spect the efficiency and practicality criteria. In case of retrofitting interventions, the univariate FCs can be plotted in the two configurations (with and without steel tie rods). In order to ef-fectively present the results, the graph of the difference of conditional probability is elaborat-ed, which directly gives the information on the earthquake intensity for which the level of im-provement is more relevant. Univariate and bivariate curves are also compared and the for-mer may be not in favor of safety, especially for stronger seismic records. This probabilistic procedure is ideal for applications in earthquake engineering, assessing in stochastic sense the level of improvement obtained with traditional retrofitting solutions

Electronic implementations of Interaction-Free Measurements

Three different implementations of interaction-free measurements (IFMs) in solid-state nanodevices are discussed. The first one is based on a series of concatenated Mach-Zehnder interferometers, in analogy to optical-IFM setups. The second one consists of a single interferometer and concatenation is achieved in the time domain making use of a quantized electron emitter. The third implementation consists of an asymmetric Aharonov-Bohm ring. For all three cases we show that the presence of a dephasing source acting on one arm of the interferometer can be detected without degrading the coherence of the measured current. Electronic implementations of IFMs in nanoelectronics may play a fundamental role as very accurate and noninvasive measuring schemes for quantum devices.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure

Entanglement detection for electrons via witness operators

We discuss an implementation of the entanglement witness, a method to detect entanglement with few local measurements, in systems where entangled electrons are generated both in the spin and orbital degrees of freedom. We address the efficiency of this method in various setups, including two different particle-hole entanglement structures, and we demonstrate that it can also be used to infer information on the possible dephasing afflicting the devices.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures; published versio