Rapid Response of an Academic Surgical Department to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Implications for Patients, Surgeons, and the Community.

BackgroundAs the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to spread, swift actions and preparation are critical for ensuring the best outcomes for patients and providers. We aim to describe our hospital and Department of Surgery's experience in preparing for the COVID-19 pandemic and caring for surgical patients during this unprecedented time.Study designThis is a descriptive study outlining the strategy of a single academic health system for addressing the following 4 critical issues facing surgical departments during the COVID-19 pandemic: developing a cohesive leadership team and system for frequent communication throughout the department; ensuring adequate hospital capacity to care for an anticipated influx of COVID-19 patients; safeguarding supplies of blood products and personal protective equipment to protect patients and providers; and preparing for an unstable workforce due to illness and competing personal priorities, such as childcare.ResultsThrough collaborative efforts within the Department of Surgery and hospital, we provided concise and regular communication, reduced operating room volume by 80%, secured a 4-week supply of personal protective equipment, and created reduced staffing protocols with back-up staffing plans.ConclusionsBy developing an enabling infrastructure, a department can nimbly respond to crises like COVID-19 by promoting trust among colleagues and emphasizing an unwavering commitment to excellent patient care. Sharing principles and practical applications of these changes is important to optimize responses across the country and the world

Piecewise moments method: Generalized Lanczos technique for nuclear response surfaces

For some years Lanczos moments methods have been combined with large-scale shell-model calculations in evaluations of the spectral distributions of certain operators. This technique is of great value because the alternative, a state-by-state summation over final states, is generally not feasible. The most celebrated application is to the Gamow-Teller operator, which governs β decay and neutrino reactions in the allowed limit. The Lanczos procedure determines the nuclear response along a line q = 0 in the (ω,q) plane, where ω and q are the energy and three-momentum transferred to the nucleus, respectively. However, generalizing such treatments from the allowed limit to general electroweak response functions at arbitrary momentum transfers seems considerably more difficult: The response function must be determined over the entire (ω,q) plane for an operator O(q) that is not fixed, but depends explicitly on q. Such operators arise in any semileptonic process in which the momentum transfer is comparable with (or larger than) the inverse nuclear size. Here we show, for Slater determinants built on harmonic-oscillator basis functions, that the nuclear response for any multipole operator O(q) can be determined efficiently over the full response plane by a generalization of the standard Lanczos moments method. We describe the piecewise moments method and thoroughly explore its convergence properties for the test case of electromagnetic responses in a full sd-shell calculation of ^(28)Si. We discuss possible extensions to a variety of electroweak processes, including charged- and neutral-current neutrino scattering

Classical simulation of noninteracting-fermion quantum circuits

We show that a class of quantum computations that was recently shown to be efficiently simulatable on a classical computer by Valiant corresponds to a physical model of noninteracting fermions in one dimension. We give an alternative proof of his result using the language of fermions and extend the result to noninteracting fermions with arbitrary pairwise interactions, where gates can be conditioned on outcomes of complete von Neumann measurements in the computational basis on other fermionic modes in the circuit. This last result is in remarkable contrast with the case of noninteracting bosons where universal quantum computation can be achieved by allowing gates to be conditioned on classical bits (quant-ph/0006088).Comment: 26 pages, 1 figure, uses wick.sty; references added to recent results by E. Knil

Zeno Dynamics of von Neumann Algebras

The dynamical quantum Zeno effect is studied in the context of von Neumann algebras. We identify a localized subalgebra on which the Zeno dynamics acts by automorphisms. The Zeno dynamics coincides with the modular dynamics of that subalgebra, if an additional assumption is satisfied. This relates the modular operator of that subalgebra to the modular operator of the original algebra by a variant of the Kato-Lie-Trotter product formula.Comment: Revised version; further typos corrected; 9 pages, AMSLaTe

Improvement in efficiency of the electrocatalytic reduction of hydrogen peroxide by prussian blue produced from the [Fe(CN)5(mpz)]2– complex

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Hydrogen peroxide is one of the most important molecules in chemical signaling in living organisms. Because of this, its sensing is indispensable for the diagnosis of many diseases. Among the materials used for the detection and quantification of H2O2, Prussian Blue (PB) has been highlighted due to its performance. Therefore, the search for alternatives or the improvement of PB performance is a challenge. In this context, our motivation was to evaluate how the ligand N-methylpyrazinium affects the structure and reactivity of Prussian Blue films produced from [Fe(CN)(5)(mpz)](2-) (PB-mpz). Based on the results, it was possible to conclude that the ligand is coordinated to the complex inside the PB framework and consequently contributes to the generation of a noncrystalline structure. The ions contained in buffer solutions can react with Prussian Blue by binding to Fe3+ and breaking the structure. In addition, a PB-mpz film in HCl/KCl showed higher sensitivity towards H2O2 than a PB film.Hydrogen peroxide is one of the most important molecules in chemical signaling in living organisms. Because of this, its sensing is indispensable for the diagnosis of many diseases. Among the materials used for the detection and quantification of H2O2, Pr20171319791988CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQFUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO - FAPESPCOORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DE PESSOAL DE NÍVEL SUPERIOR - CAPESConselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)459923/2014‐52013/22127‐2sem informaçãoThe authors acknowledge the financial support of the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) (grant no. 459923/2014‐5), the Fundo de Apoio ao Ensino, à Pesquisa e à Extensão – Universidade Estadual de Campinas (FAEPEX‐UNICAMP

The Rotation Average in Lightcone Time-Ordered Perturbation Theory

We present a rotation average of the two-body scattering amplitude in the lightcone time($\tau$)-ordered perturbation theory. Using a rotation average procedure, we show that the contribution of individual time-ordered diagram can be quantified in a Lorentz invariant way. The number of time-ordered diagrams can also be reduced by half if the masses of two bodies are same. In the numerical example of $\phi^{3}$ theory, we find that the higher Fock-state contribution is quite small in the lightcone quantization.Comment: 25 pages, REVTeX, epsf.sty, 69 eps file

Spectral Properties of delta-Plutonium: Sensitivity to 5f Occupancy

By combining the local density approximation (LDA) with dynamical mean field theory (DMFT), we report a systematic analysis of the spectral properties of $\delta$-plutonium with varying $5f$ occupancy. The LDA Hamiltonian is extracted from a tight-binding (TB) fit to full-potential linearized augmented plane-wave (FP-LAPW) calculations. The DMFT equations are solved by the exact quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method and the Hubbard-I approximation. We have shown for the first time the strong sensitivity of the spectral properties to the $5f$ occupancy, which suggests using this occupancy as a fitting parameter in addition to the Hubbard $U$. By comparing with PES data, we conclude that the ``open shell'' $5f^{5}$ configuration gives the best agreement, resolving the controversy over $5f$ ``open shell'' versus ``close shell'' atomic configurations in $\delta$-Pu.Comment: 6 pages, 2 embedded color figures, to appear in Physical Review