Fidelity susceptibility and general quench near an anisotropic quantum critical point

We study the scaling behavior of fidelity susceptibility density $(\chi_{\rm f})$ at or close to an anisotropic quantum critical point characterized by two different correlation length exponents $\nu_{||}$ and $\nu_{\bot}$ along parallel and perpendicular spatial directions, respectively. Our studies show that the response of the system due to a small change in the Hamiltonian near an anisotropic quantum critical point is different from that seen near an isotropic quantum critical point. In particular, for a finite system with linear dimension $L_{||}$ ($L_{\bot}$) in the parallel (perpendicular) directions, the maximum value of $\chi_{\rm f}$ is found to increases in a power-law fashion with $L_{||}$ for small $L_{||}$, with an exponent depending on both $\nu_{||}$ and $\nu_{\bot}$ and eventually crosses over to a scaling with $L_{\bot}$ for $L_{||}^{1/\nu_{||}} \gtrsim L_{\bot}^{1/\nu_{\bot}}$. We also propose scaling relations of heat density and defect density generated following a quench starting from an anisotropic quantum critical point and connect them to a generalized fidelity susceptibility. These predictions are verified exactly both analytically and numerically taking the example of a Hamiltonian showing a semi-Dirac band-crossing point.Comment: 6 pages, 6 pigure

Practice of wastewater irrigation and its impacts on human health and environment: a state of the art

The practice of wastewater irrigation lessens the pressure on the aquatic environment by minimizing the use of freshwater resources. However, this may lead to significant damage to the human health and environments. Recycled wastewater possesses a substantial amount of nutrients that act as fertilizers for crops and facilitate the metabolic action of microorganisms. The major advantages of wastewater irrigation are increased agricultural production, nutrient recycling, reduced stress on freshwater, economical support and provision of livelihoods for farmers. However, several harmful impacts of wastewater irrigation are also prominent due to inappropriate wastewater management and irrigation practices. These include severe hazards to farmer’s health, contamination of agricultural land and crops with toxic metals, chemical compounds, salts and microbial pathogens. In addition, long-term irrigation using wastewater can significantly affect the groundwater through leakage of salty and toxic metal-rich wastewater making it unfit for human consumption. Wastewater irrigation may also alter the physicochemical properties and microbiota of soil, which in turn can disturb land fertility and crop productivity. Several factors need to be considered while using treated or partially treated wastewater for irrigation such as diversity and type of pollutants, available nutrients, pathogenic microorganisms and soil salinity. In this review paper, we assess the impact of wastewater irrigation on humans as well as on the environment based on available case studies globally, outline current use of wastewater for irrigation of agricultural crops such as cereals, vegetables, fodder crops, including agroforestry and discuss suitable management practices of wastewater reuse for irrigation

Switching of the topologically trivial and non-trivial quantum phase transitions in compressed 1T-TiTe2: Experiments and Theory

We report the structural, vibrational and electrical transport properties up to 16 GPa of the 1T-TiTe2, a prominent layered 2D system, which is predicted to show a series of topologically trivial - nontrivial transitions under hydrostatic compression. We clearly show signatures of two iso-structural transition at 2 GPa and 4 GPa obtained from the minima in c/a ratio concomitant with the phonon linewidth anomalies of Eg and A1g modes at around the same pressures, providing strong indication of unusual electron-phonon coupling associated to these transitions. Resistivity presents nonlinear behavior over similar pressure ranges providing a strong indication of the electronic origin of these pressure driven isostructural transitions. Our data thus provide clear evidences of topological changes at A and L point of the Brillouin zone predicted to be present in the compressed 1T-TiTe2. Between 4 GPa and 8 GPa, the c/a ratio shows a plateau suggesting a transformation from an anisotropic 2D layer to a quasi 3D crystal network. First principles calculations suggest that the 2D to quasi 3D evolution without any structural phase transitions is mainly due to the increased interlayer Te-Te interactions (bridging) via the charge density overlap. In addition to the pressure dependent isostructural phase transitions, our data also evidences the occurrence of a first order structural phase transition from the trigonal (P-3m1) phase at higher pressures. We estimate the start of this structural phase transition to be 8 GPa and the symmetric of the new high-pressure phase to be monoclinic (C2/m).Comment: 22 pages, 11 Figures, 2 Table

Substrate Inhibition Growth Kinetics for Cutinase Producing Pseudomonas cepacia Using Tomato-peel Extracted Cutin

Using tomato-peel extracted cutin, an economically viable substrate, cutinase production by Pseudomonas cepacia was studied at different initial substrate concentrations (2–20 g L–1). The highest volumetric enzyme activity was observed at 10 g L–1 of cutin, which was inhibited at further higher concentrations. Various 3-, 4- and 5- parametric Monod-variant models were chosen to analyze the inhibition kinetics. The model parameters as well as goodness of fit were estimated using non-linear regression analysis. The 4- parameter Webb model was the best-fit model (R2 = 0.933), followed by the 3-parameter Andrews model (R2 = 0.92). Parameter sensitivity analysis revealed that the maximum specific growth rate was the most sensitive parameter for both the models, and the Webb constant was the least sensitive. Finally, based on a strong evidence ratio 190.65 from Akaike’s information content criteria analysis as well as extra sum of square F test (P > 0.05), it was found that 3-parameter Andrews model gave the best fit

How did the discussion go: Discourse act classification in social media conversations

We propose a novel attention based hierarchical LSTM model to classify discourse act sequences in social media conversations, aimed at mining data from online discussion using textual meanings beyond sentence level. The very uniqueness of the task is the complete categorization of possible pragmatic roles in informal textual discussions, contrary to extraction of question-answers, stance detection or sarcasm identification which are very much role specific tasks. Early attempt was made on a Reddit discussion dataset. We train our model on the same data, and present test results on two different datasets, one from Reddit and one from Facebook. Our proposed model outperformed the previous one in terms of domain independence; without using platform-dependent structural features, our hierarchical LSTM with word relevance attention mechanism achieved F1-scores of 71\% and 66\% respectively to predict discourse roles of comments in Reddit and Facebook discussions. Efficiency of recurrent and convolutional architectures in order to learn discursive representation on the same task has been presented and analyzed, with different word and comment embedding schemes. Our attention mechanism enables us to inquire into relevance ordering of text segments according to their roles in discourse. We present a human annotator experiment to unveil important observations about modeling and data annotation. Equipped with our text-based discourse identification model, we inquire into how heterogeneous non-textual features like location, time, leaning of information etc. play their roles in charaterizing online discussions on Facebook

Quantum Discord in a spin-1/2 transverse XY Chain Following a Quench

We report a study on the zero-temperature quantum discord as a measure of two-spin correlation of a transverse XY spin chain following a quench across a quantum critical point and investigate the behavior of mutual information, classical correlations and hence of discord in the final state as a function of the rate of quenching. We show that though discord vanishes in the limit of very slow as well as very fast quenching, it exhibits a peak for an intermediate value of the quenching rate. We show that though discord and also the mutual information exhibit a similar behavior with respect to the quenching rate to that of concurrence or negativity following an identical quenching, there are quantitative differences. Our studies indicate that like concurrence, discord also exhibits a power law scaling with the rate of quenching in the limit of slow quenching though it may not be expressible in a closed power law form. We also explore the behavior of discord on quenching linearly across a quantum multicritical point (MCP) and observe a scaling similar to that of the defect density.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Quantum Poincare Recurrences for Hydrogen Atom in a Microwave Field

We study the time dependence of the ionization probability of Rydberg atoms driven by a microwave field, both in classical and in quantum mechanics. The quantum survival probability follows the classical one up to the Heisenberg time and then decays algebraically as P(t) ~ 1/t. This decay law derives from the exponentially long times required to escape from some region of the phase space, due to tunneling and localization effects. We also provide parameter values which should allow to observe such decay in laboratory experiments.Comment: revtex, 4 pages, 4 figure

Intermediate scale as a source of lepton flavor violation in SUSY SO(10)

In supersymmetric SO(10) grand unified models, we examine the lepton flavor violation process $\mu \rightarrow e\gamma$ from having the SU(2)$_R\times$U(1)$_{B-L}$ gauge symmetry broken at an intermediate scale $M_I$ below the SO(10) grand unification scale $M_G$. Even in the case that supersymmetry is broken by universal soft terms introduced at the scale $M_G$, we find significant rates for $\mu\rightarrow e\gamma$ with $M_I \sim 10^{12}$ GeV or less. These rates are further enhanced if the universal soft terms appear at a scale greater than $M_G$.Comment: 12 pages (Latex), 3 PS Figures (uuencoded, epsf.tex), small addition to discussion in the text, as to appear in Phys. Rev. D Rapid Communication