87 research outputs found
Quantum Limits of Stochastic Cooling of a Bosonic Gas
The quantum limits of stochastic cooling of trapped atoms are studied. The
energy subtraction due to the applied feedback is shown to contain an
additional noise term due to atom-number fluctuations in the feedback region.
This novel effect is shown to dominate the cooling efficiency near the
condensation point. Furthermore, we show first results that indicate that
Bose--Einstein condensation could be reached via stochastic cooling.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.
Physics with antihydrogen
Performing measurements of the properties of antihydrogen, the bound state of an antiproton and a positron, and comparing the results with those for ordinary hydrogen, has long been seen as a route to test some of the fundamental principles of physics. There has been much experimental progress in this direction in recent years, and antihydrogen is now routinely created and trapped and a range of exciting measurements probing the foundations of modern physics are planned or underway. In this contribution we review the techniques developed to facilitate the capture and manipulation of positrons and antiprotons, along with procedures to bring them together to create antihydrogen. Once formed, the antihydrogen has been detected by its destruction via annihilation or field ionization, and aspects of the methodologies involved are summarized. Magnetic minimum neutral atom traps have been employed to allow some of the antihydrogen created to be held for considerable periods. We describe such devices, and their implementation, along with the cusp magnetic trap used to produce the first evidence for a low-energy beam of antihydrogen. The experiments performed to date on antihydrogen are discussed, including the first observation of a resonant quantum transition and the analyses that have yielded a limit on the electrical neutrality of the anti-atom and placed crude bounds on its gravitational behaviour. Our review concludes with an outlook, including the new ELENA extension to the antiproton decelerator facility at CERN, together with summaries of how we envisage the major threads of antihydrogen physics will progress in the coming years
A Combinatorial Framework for Designing (Pseudoknotted) RNA Algorithms
We extend an hypergraph representation, introduced by Finkelstein and
Roytberg, to unify dynamic programming algorithms in the context of RNA folding
with pseudoknots. Classic applications of RNA dynamic programming energy
minimization, partition function, base-pair probabilities...) are reformulated
within this framework, giving rise to very simple algorithms. This
reformulation allows one to conceptually detach the conformation space/energy
model -- captured by the hypergraph model -- from the specific application,
assuming unambiguity of the decomposition. To ensure the latter property, we
propose a new combinatorial methodology based on generating functions. We
extend the set of generic applications by proposing an exact algorithm for
extracting generalized moments in weighted distribution, generalizing a prior
contribution by Miklos and al. Finally, we illustrate our full-fledged
programme on three exemplary conformation spaces (secondary structures,
Akutsu's simple type pseudoknots and kissing hairpins). This readily gives sets
of algorithms that are either novel or have complexity comparable to classic
implementations for minimization and Boltzmann ensemble applications of dynamic
programming
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