Controlling single-photon transport with three-level quantum dots in photonic crystals

published_or_final_versio

Influence of corruption on economic growth rate and foreign investments

In order to investigate whether government regulations against corruption can affect the economic growth of a country, we analyze the dependence between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita growth rates and changes in the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). For the period 1999-2004 on average for all countries in the world, we find that an increase of CPI by one unit leads to an increase of the annual GDP per capita by 1.7 %. By regressing only European transition countries, we find that $\Delta$CPI = 1 generates increase of the annual GDP per capita by 2.4 %. We also analyze the relation between foreign direct investments received by different countries and CPI, and we find a statistically significant power-law functional dependence between foreign direct investment per capita and the country corruption level measured by the CPI. We introduce a new measure to quantify the relative corruption between countries based on their respective wealth as measured by GDP per capita.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, elsart styl

A study on nitrogen removal efficiency of Pseudomonas stutzeri strains isolated from an anaerobic/anoxic/oxic wastewater treatment process

In order to improve the nitrogen removal efficiency in an anaerobic/anoxic/oxic treatment plant, a strain with high nitrification and denitrification capability was isolated from a specific anaerobic/anoxic/oxic treatment process. The characteristics of isolate were experimentally analyzed. By using the nitrogen balance method, the total nitrogen loss was calculated to be 40.1% (w/w) when the carbon source was citric acid with a C/N ratio of 5. Meanwhile, the isolated strain was identified by 16S rDNA to be a Pseudomonas stutzeri with a similarity of 99%. Varying the initial TN, the C/N, the pH value and the ambient temperature in the reaction system, the efficiency of nitrogen removal was studied. The results showed that the highest efficiency occurred when the C/N was 12, the pH value was 7 and the temperature was 32°C. The results were also compared to the practically monitoring data coming with a good agreement. Consequently, it is viable to improve the nitrogen removal efficiency by varying the reaction conditions

Geometric discord and Measurement-induced nonlocality for well known bound entangled states

We employ geometric discord and measurement induced nonlocality to quantify non classical correlations of some well-known bipartite bound entangled states, namely the two families of Horodecki's ($2\otimes 4$, $3\otimes 3$ and $4\otimes 4$ dimensional) bound entangled states and that of Bennett etal's in $3\otimes 3$ dimension. In most of the cases our results are analytic and both the measures attain relatively small value. The amount of quantumness in the $4\otimes 4$ bound entangled state of Benatti etal and the $2\otimes 8$ state having the same matrix representation (in computational basis) is same. Coincidently, the $2m\otimes 2m$ Werner and isotropic states also exhibit the same property, when seen as $2\otimes 2m^2$ dimensional states.Comment: V2: Title changed, one more state added; 11 pages (single column), 2 figures, accepted in Quantum Information Processin

Purification and Characterization of a New D-Galactose-Specific Lectin from the Housefly, Musca domestica, and Its Antiproliferative Effect on Human K562 and MCF-7 Tumor Cells

In the present work, a D-galactose-specific lectin with novel N-terminal sequence was purified from Musca domestica L. (Diptera: Muscidae) pupae. The purification was performed using affinity chromatography, ultra-filtration, and HPLC. The haemagglutinating activity of M. domestica lectin was specifically inhibited by D-galactose. The haemagglutinating activity of this lectin was stable at temperatures up to 65° C and in pH ranging from 4 to 8. Salts including FeCl3 and MnCl2 inhibited the haemagglutinating process, whereas NaCl, KCl, CaCl2, MgCl2, ZnCl2, and AlCl3 did not. By SDS-PAGE, purified M. domestica pupae lectin yielded a single band with a molecular weight of 40 kDa, with or without reduction of β-mercaptoethanol, and it could be stained with Alcian Blue 8 GX. The morphology of purified lectin was observed by atomic force microscopy, which indicated that M. domestica lectin was an 8.27 nm high, globular shaped glycoprotein with a 1.41 nm high polysaccharide chain. In addition, antiproliferative activity of this lectin against tumor cells K562 and MCF-7 was determined with a colorimetric assay using 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyl tetrazolium bromide, which showed that the antiproliferative process was time- and dose-dependent with an IC50 of 5.7 and 6.7 at 24 h, 5.5 and 6.4 at 36 h, 5.2 and 6.5 µM at 48 h, respectively

Assessing the removal of organic micro-pollutants from anaerobic membrane bioreactor effluent by fertilizer-drawn forward osmosis

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. In this study, the behavior of organic micro-pollutants (OMPs) transport including membrane fouling was assessed in fertilizer-drawn forward osmosis (FDFO) during treatment of the anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR) effluent. The flux decline was negligible when the FO membrane was oriented with active layer facing feed solution (AL-FS) while severe flux decline was observed with active layer facing draw solution (AL-DS) with di-ammonium phosphate (DAP) fertilizer as DS due to struvite scaling inside the membrane support layer. DAP DS however exhibited the lowest OMPs forward flux or higher OMPs rejection rate compared to other two fertilizers (i.e., mono-ammonium phosphate (MAP) and KCl). MAP and KCl fertilizer DS had higher water fluxes that induced higher external concentration polarization (ECP) and enhanced OMPs flux through the FO membrane. Under the AL-DS mode of membrane orientation, OMPs transport was further increased with MAP and KCl as DS due to enhanced concentrative internal concentration polarization while with DAP the internal scaling enhanced mass transfer resistance thereby lowering OMPs flux. Physical or hydraulic cleaning could successfully recover water flux for FO membranes operated under the AL-FS mode but only partial flux recovery was observed for membranes operated under AL-DS mode because of internal scaling and fouling in the support layer. Osmotic backwashing could however significantly improve the cleaning efficiency

Experimental Demonstration of Five-photon Entanglement and Open-destination Teleportation

Universal quantum error-correction requires the ability of manipulating entanglement of five or more particles. Although entanglement of three or four particles has been experimentally demonstrated and used to obtain the extreme contradiction between quantum mechanics and local realism, the realization of five-particle entanglement remains an experimental challenge. Meanwhile, a crucial experimental challenge in multi-party quantum communication and computation is the so-called open-destination teleportation. During open-destination teleportation, an unknown quantum state of a single particle is first teleported onto a N-particle coherent superposition to perform distributed quantum information processing. At a later stage this teleported state can be readout at any of the N particles for further applications by performing a projection measurement on the remaining N-1 particles. Here, we report a proof-of-principle demonstration of five-photon entanglement and open-destination teleportation. In the experiment, we use two entangled photon pairs to generate a four-photon entangled state, which is then combined with a single photon state to achieve the experimental goals. The methods developed in our experiment would have various applications e.g. in quantum secret sharing and measurement-based quantum computation.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, submitted for publication on 15 October, 200