Entanglement of subspaces in terms of entanglement of superpositions

We investigate upper and lower bounds on the entropy of entanglement of a superposition of bipartite states as a function of the individual states in the superposition. In particular, we extend the results in [G. Gour, arxiv.org:0704.1521 (2007)] to superpositions of several states rather than just two. We then investigate the entanglement in a subspace as a function of its basis states: we find upper bounds for the largest entanglement in a subspace and demonstrate that no such lower bound for the smallest entanglement exists. Finally, we consider entanglement of superpositions using measures of entanglement other than the entropy of entanglement.Comment: 7 pages, no figure

Novel screening test for celiac disease using peptide functionalised gold nanoparticles

© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved. AIM To develop a screening test for celiac disease based on the coating of gold nanoparticles with a peptide sequence derived from gliadin, the protein that triggers celiac disease. METHODS 20 nm gold nanoparticles were first coated with NeutrAvidin. A long chain Polyethylene glycol (PEG) linker containing Maleimide at the Ω-end and Biotin group at the α-end was used to ensure peptide coating to the gold nanoparticles. The maleimide group with the thiol (-SH) side chain reacted with the cysteine amino acid in the peptide sequence and the biotinylated and PEGylated peptide was added to the NeutrAvidin coated gold nanoparticles. The peptide coated gold nanoparticles were then converted into a serological assay. We used the peptide functionalised gold nanoparticle-based assay on thirty patient serum samples in a blinded assessment and compared our results with the previously run serological and pathological tests on these patients. RESULTS A stable colloidal suspension of peptide coated gold nanoparticles was obtained without any aggregation. An absorbance peak shift as well as color change was caused by the aggregation of gold nanoparticles following the addition of anti-gliadin antibody to peptide coated nanoparticles at levels associated with celiac disease. The developed assay has been shown to detect anti-gliadin antibody not only in quantitatively spiked samples but also in a small-scale study on real non-hemolytic celiac disease patient’s samples. CONCLUSION The study demonstrates the potential of gold nanoparticle-peptide based approach to be adapted for developing a screening assay for celiac disease diagnosis. The assay could be a part of an exclusion based diagnostic strategy and prove particularly useful for testing high celiac disease risk populations

Creativity, ambiguous figures, and academic preference

Research suggests that ambiguous figure reversal is associated with creativity, but current evidence relies on subjective self-report that is difficult to quantify (Wiseman, Watt, Gilhooly, Georgiou, 2011 British Journal of Psychology 102 615-622). Using quantifiable measures of both phenomena we confirm this claim. We also find that participants studying science experience much more frequent reversal-a novel and intriguing finding. Keywords: ambiguous figure reversal, creativity, academic preferenc

Renewable Ammonia

Ammonia is one of the most widely used chemicals that is commercially produced today given the wide need for fertilizer to sustain the world’s ever-growing populations. Given the high world demand for ammonia, which increases every day, one can see how beneficial to the environment that a zero emission large-scale ammonia plant would be. Through the use of energy from Norwegian wind farms, which produce an excess of energy during off-peak hours, our plant design seeks to turn this wasted energy into useful ammonia products at a production rate of 67.2 kmol/hr. The design of this ammonia synthesis plant can be split conceptually into two distinct halves. The first is the refinement of the hydrogen and nitrogen that are required for the Haber-Bosch synthesis from the raw inputs of air and water. This is done through the usage of solid oxide electrolytic cells which electrolyze the water into constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms and separate the oxygen out of the air. The second half of the plant design is a typical Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis that many plants today are utilizing. This section consists mainly of a reaction vessel at the correct operating conditions for the ammonia synthesis reaction to occur, and a series of separators that recoup the liquid ammonia product at the right conditions for storage while recycling the gaseous hydrogen and nitrogen reactants. While this plant design provides a layout to accomplish the task of producing ammonia in an environmentally friendly way, it is less friendly to the wallet of the plant owner. Selling the ammonia product at current market rates of $853/ton, it would take roughly 15 years for the plant to overcome the capital investment of the venture and become a monetarily net positive design. Current utility prices are projected to cost the plant over$1.7 million dollars per year, which is another significant consideration why it takes such a large amount of time for the plant to become profitable. It is our hope that ongoing refinement of solid oxide electrolytic units will enable their purchase at cheaper rates, and that as the environment worsens, a higher premium will be placed on chemical products that have been sourced renewably, both factors that could easily make this plant design a more viable option in the future than it currently is today

A note on the optimality of decomposable entanglement witnesses and completely entangled subspaces

Entanglement witnesses (EWs) constitute one of the most important entanglement detectors in quantum systems. Nevertheless, their complete characterization, in particular with respect to the notion of optimality, is still missing, even in the decomposable case. Here we show that for any qubit-qunit decomposable EW (DEW) W the three statements are equivalent: (i) the set of product vectors obeying \bra{e,f}W\ket{e,f}=0 spans the corresponding Hilbert space, (ii) W is optimal, (iii) W=Q^{\Gamma} with Q denoting a positive operator supported on a completely entangled subspace (CES) and \Gamma standing for the partial transposition. While, implications $(i)\Rightarrow(ii)$ and $(ii)\Rightarrow(iii)$ are known, here we prove that (iii) implies (i). This is a consequence of a more general fact saying that product vectors orthogonal to any CES in C^{2}\otimes C^{n} span after partial conjugation the whole space. On the other hand, already in the case of C^{3}\otimes C^{3} Hilbert space, there exist DEWs for which (iii) does not imply (i). Consequently, either (i) does not imply (ii), or (ii) does not imply (iii), and the above transparent characterization obeyed by qubit-qunit DEWs, does not hold in general.Comment: 13 pages, proof of lemma 4 corrected, theorem 3 removed, some parts improve

Four-qubit entanglement from string theory

We invoke the black hole/qubit correspondence to derive the classification of four-qubit entanglement. The U-duality orbits resulting from timelike reduction of string theory from D=4 to D=3 yield 31 entanglement families, which reduce to nine up to permutation of the four qubits.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, revtex; minor corrections, references adde

Voltage security evaluation based on perturbation method

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.This paper proposes a new algorithm for estimating voltage security margin. The algorithm is based on the perturbation method and has significant computational efficiency. The proposed algorithm can be used for on-line voltage security evaluation. It has been validated using IEEE-14, IEEE-30 and IEEE-57 bus systems. Results from the tests show higher efficiency and smaller error margins compared to continuation power flow (CPF) method. Voltage collapse is a serious threat to the security of stressed power systems; therefore, voltage security (VS) has become a major challenge for management of power systems. The motivation for this research is a direct consequence of the deregulation of electricity industries and markets worldwide

Localization of Multi-Dimensional Wigner Distributions

A well known result of P. Flandrin states that a Gaussian uniquely maximizes the integral of the Wigner distribution over every centered disc in the phase plane. While there is no difficulty in generalizing this result to higher-dimensional poly-discs, the generalization to balls is less obvious. In this note we provide such a generalization.Comment: Minor corrections, to appear in the Journal of Mathematical Physic

An Alternative Prior Process for Nonparametric Bayesian Clustering

Prior distributions play a crucial role in Bayesian approaches to clustering. Two commonly-used prior distributions are the Dirichlet and Pitman-Yor processes. In this paper, we investigate the predictive probabilities that underlie these processes, and the implicit "rich-get-richer" characteristic of the resulting partitions. We explore an alternative prior for nonparametric Bayesian clustering -- the uniform process -- for applications where the "rich-get-richer" property is undesirable. We also explore the cost of this process: partitions are no longer exchangeable with respect to the ordering of variables. We present new asymptotic and simulation-based results for the clustering characteristics of the uniform process and compare these with known results for the Dirichlet and Pitman-Yor processes. We compare performance on a real document clustering task, demonstrating the practical advantage of the uniform process despite its lack of exchangeability over orderings