Adiabatic polaron dynamics and Josephson effect in a superconducting molecular quantum dot

We study the Josephson current through a resonant level coupled to a vibration mode (local Holstein model) in the adiabatic limit of low oscillator frequency. A semiclassical theory is then appropriate and allows us to consider the oscillator dynamics within the Born-Oppenheimer approximation for arbitrary electron-vibration couplings. The resulting Fokker-Planck equation has been solved in the most relevant underdamped limit and yields the oscillator distribution function and the Josephson current. Remarkably, a transition from single-well to double-well behavior of the effective oscillator potential surface is possible and can be tuned by variation of the superconducting phase difference. The Josephson current is shown to be only weakly affected by the electron-vibration coupling due to strong phonon localization near the bottom of the potential surface.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, final version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Applying voltage sources to a Luttinger liquid with arbitrary transmission

The Landauer approach to transport in mesoscopic conductors has been generalized to allow for strong electronic correlations in a single-channel quantum wire. We describe in detail how to account for external voltage sources in adiabatic contact with a quantum wire containing a backscatterer of arbitrary strength. Assuming that the quantum wire is in the Luttinger liquid state, voltage sources lead to radiative boundary conditions applied to the displacement field employed in the bosonization scheme. We present the exact solution of the transport problem for arbitrary backscattering strength at the special Coulomb interaction parameter g=1/2.Comment: 9 pages REVTeX, incl 2 fig

A search for soft X-ray emission associated with prominent high-velocity-cloud complexes

We correlate the ROSAT 1/4 keV all-sky survey with the Leiden/Dwingeloo HI survey, looking for soft X-ray signatures of prominent high-velocity-cloud (HVC) complexes. We study the transfer of 1/4 keV photons through the interstellar medium in order to distinguish variations in the soft X-ray background (SXRB) intensity caused by photoelectric absorption effects from those due to excess X-ray emission. The X-ray data are modelled as a combination of emission from the Local Hot Bubble (LHB) and emission from a distant plasma in the galactic halo and extragalactic sources. The X-ray radiation intensity of the galactic halo and extragalactic X-ray background is modulated by the photoelectric absorption of the intervening galactic interstellar matter. We show that large- and small-scale intensity variations of the 1/4 keV SXRB are caused by photoelectric absorption which is predominantly traced by the total N(HI) distribution. The extensive coverage of the two surveys supports evidence for a hot, X-ray emitting corona. We show that this leads to a good representation of the SXRB observations. For four large areas on the sky, we search for regions where the modelled and observed X-ray emission differ. We find that there is excess X-ray emission towards regions near HVC complexes C, D, and GCN. We suggest that the excess X-ray emission is positionally correlated with the high-velocity clouds. Some lines of sight towards HVCs also pass through significant amounts of intermediate-velocity gas, so we cannot constrain the possible role played by IVC gas in these directions of HVC and IVC overlap, in determining the X-ray excesses.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics main journa

Electron injection in a nanotube with leads: finite frequency noise-correlations and anomalous charges

The non-equilibrium transport properties of a carbon nanotube which is connected to Fermi liquid leads, where electrons are injected in the bulk, are computed. A previous work which considered an infinite nanotube showed that the zero frequency noise correlations, measured at opposite ends of the nanotube, could be used to extract the anomalous charges of the chiral excitations which propagate in the nanotube. Here, the presence of the leads have the effect that such-noise cross-correlations vanish at zero frequency. Nevertheless, information concerning the anomalous charges can be recovered when considering the spectral density of noise correlations at finite frequencies, which is computed perturbatively in the tunneling amplitude. The spectrum of the noise cross-correlations is shown to depend crucially on the ratio of the time of flight of quasiparticles traveling in the nanotube to the ``voltage'' time which defines the width of the quasiparticle wave-packets injected when an electron tunnels. Potential applications toward the measurement of such anomalous charges in non-chiral Luttinger liquids (nanotubes or semiconductor quantum wires) are discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Current-induced non-adiabatic spin torques and domain wall motion with spin relaxation in a ferromagnetic metallic wire

Within the s-d model description, we derive the current-driven spin torque in a ferromagnet, taking explicitly into account a spin-relaxing Caldeira-Leggett bath coupling to the s-electrons. We derive Bloch-Redfield equations of motion for the s-electron spin dynamics, and formulate a systematic gradient expansion to obtain non-adiabatic (higher-order) corrections to the well-known adiabatic (first-order) spin torque. We provide simple analytical expressions for the second-order spin torque. The theory is applied to current-driven domain wall motion. Second-order contributions imply a deformation of a transverse tail-to-tail domain wall. The wall center still moves with a constant velocity that now depends on the spin-polarized current in a non-trivial manner.Comment: Phys. Rev. B, in press, replaced with published versio

Correlated sequential tunneling through a double barrier for interacting one-dimensional electrons

The problem of resonant tunneling through a quantum dot weakly coupled to spinless Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids has been studied. We compute the linear conductance due to sequential tunneling processes upon employing a master equation approach. Besides the previously used lowest-order golden rule rates describing uncorrelated sequential tunneling (UST) processes, we systematically include higher-order correlated sequential tunneling (CST) diagrams within the standard Weisskopf-Wigner approximation. We provide estimates for the parameter regions where CST effects can be important. Focusing mainly on the temperature dependence of the peak conductance, we discuss the relation of these findings to previous theoretical and experimental results.Comment: replaced with the published versio

A 3D Face Modelling Approach for Pose-Invariant Face Recognition in a Human-Robot Environment

Face analysis techniques have become a crucial component of human-machine interaction in the fields of assistive and humanoid robotics. However, the variations in head-pose that arise naturally in these environments are still a great challenge. In this paper, we present a real-time capable 3D face modelling framework for 2D in-the-wild images that is applicable for robotics. The fitting of the 3D Morphable Model is based exclusively on automatically detected landmarks. After fitting, the face can be corrected in pose and transformed back to a frontal 2D representation that is more suitable for face recognition. We conduct face recognition experiments with non-frontal images from the MUCT database and uncontrolled, in the wild images from the PaSC database, the most challenging face recognition database to date, showing an improved performance. Finally, we present our SCITOS G5 robot system, which incorporates our framework as a means of image pre-processing for face analysis