Assessment of sexual difficulties associated with multi-modal treatment for cervical or endometrial cancer: A systematic review of measurement instruments

Background: Practitioners and researchers require an outcome measure that accurately identifies the range of common treatment-induced changes in sexual function and well-being experienced by women after cervical or endometrial cancer. This systematic review critically appraised the measurement properties and clinical utility of instruments validated for the measurement of female sexual dysfunction (FSD) in this clinical population. Methods: A bibliographic database search for questionnaire development or validation papers was completed and methodological quality and measurement properties of selected studies rated using the Consensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement Instrument (COSMIN) checklist. Results: 738 articles were screened, 13 articles retrieved for full text assessment and 7 studies excluded, resulting in evaluation of 6 papers; 2 QoL and 4 female sexual morbidity measures. Five of the six instruments omitted one or more dimension of female sexual function and only one instrument explicitly measured distress associated with sexual changes as per DSM V (APA 2013) diagnostic criteria. None of the papers reported measurement error, responsiveness data was available for only two instruments, three papers failed to report on criterion validity, and test-retest reliability reporting was inconsistent. Heterosexual penile-vaginal intercourse remains the dominant sexual activity focus for sexual morbidity PROMS terminology and instruments lack explicit reference to solo or non-coital sexual expression or validation in a non-heterosexual sample. Four out of six instruments included mediating treatment or illness items such as vaginal changes, menopause or altered body image. Conclusions: Findings suggest that the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) remains the most robust sexual morbidity outcome measure, for research or clinical use, in sexually active women treated for cervical or endometrial cancer

A matched expansion approach to practical self-force calculations

We discuss a practical method to compute the self-force on a particle moving through a curved spacetime. This method involves two expansions to calculate the self-force, one arising from the particle's immediate past and the other from the more distant past. The expansion in the immediate past is a covariant Taylor series and can be carried out for all geometries. The more distant expansion is a mode sum, and may be carried out in those cases where the wave equation for the field mediating the self-force admits a mode expansion of the solution. In particular, this method can be used to calculate the gravitational self-force for a particle of mass mu orbiting a black hole of mass M to order mu^2, provided mu/M << 1. We discuss how to use these two expansions to construct a full self-force, and in particular investigate criteria for matching the two expansions. As with all methods of computing self-forces for particles moving in black hole spacetimes, one encounters considerable technical difficulty in applying this method; nevertheless, it appears that the convergence of each series is good enough that a practical implementation may be plausible.Comment: IOP style, 8 eps figures, accepted for publication in a special issue of Classical and Quantum Gravit

The Consumption of Reference Resources

Under the operational restriction of the U(1)-superselection rule, states that contain coherences between eigenstates of particle number constitute a resource. Such resources can be used to facilitate operations upon systems that otherwise cannot be performed. However, the process of doing this consumes reference resources. We show this explicitly for an example of a unitary operation that is forbidden by the U(1)-superselection rule.Comment: 4 pages 6x9 page format, 2 figure

All-optical versus electro-optical quantum-limited feedback

All-optical feedback can be effected by putting the output of a source cavity through a Faraday isolator and into a second cavity which is coupled to the source cavity by a nonlinear crystal. If the driven cavity is heavily damped, then it can be adiabatically eliminated and a master equation or quantum Langevin equation derived for the first cavity alone. This is done for an input bath in an arbitrary state, and for an arbitrary nonlinear coupling. If the intercavity coupling involves only the intensity (or one quadrature) of the driven cavity, then the effect on the source cavity is identical to that which can be obtained from electro-optical feedback using direct (or homodyne) detection. If the coupling involves both quadratures, this equivalence no longer holds, and a coupling linear in the source amplitude can produce a nonclassical state in the source cavity. The analogous electro-optic scheme using heterodyne detection introduces extra noise which prevents the production of nonclassical light. Unlike the electro-optic case, the all-optical feedback loop has an output beam (reflected from the second cavity). We show that this may be squeezed, even if the source cavity remains in a classical state.Comment: 21 pages. This is an old (1994) paper, but one which I thought was worth posting because in addition to what is described in abstract it has: (1) the first formulation (to my knowledge) of quantum trajectories for an arbitrary (i.e. squeezed, thermal etc.) broadband bath; (2) the prediction of a periodic modification to the detuning and damping of an oscillator for the simplest sort of all-optical feedback (i.e. a mirror) as seen in the recent experiment "Forces between a Single Atom and Its Distant Mirror Image", P. Bushev et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 223602 (2004

Atom Lasers, Coherent States, and Coherence:II. Maximally Robust Ensembles of Pure States

As discussed in Wiseman and Vaccaro [quant-ph/9906125], the stationary state of an optical or atom laser far above threshold is a mixture of coherent field states with random phase, or, equivalently, a Poissonian mixture of number states. We are interested in which, if either, of these descriptions of $\rho_{ss}$, is more natural. In the preceding paper we concentrated upon whether descriptions such as these are physically realizable (PR). In this paper we investigate another relevant aspect of these ensembles, their robustness. A robust ensemble is one for which the pure states that comprise it survive relatively unchanged for a long time under the system evolution. We determine numerically the most robust ensembles as a function of the parameters in the laser model: the self-energy $\chi$ of the bosons in the laser mode, and the excess phase noise $\nu$. We find that these most robust ensembles are PR ensembles, or similar to PR ensembles, for all values of these parameters. In the ideal laser limit ($\nu=\chi=0$), the most robust states are coherent states. As the phase noise $\nu$ or phase dispersion $\chi$ is increased, the most robust states become increasingly amplitude-squeezed. We find scaling laws for these states. As the phase diffusion or dispersion becomes so large that the laser output is no longer quantum coherent, the most robust states become so squeezed that they cease to have a well-defined coherent amplitude. That is, the quantum coherence of the laser output is manifest in the most robust PR states having a well-defined coherent amplitude. This lends support to the idea that robust PR ensembles are the most natural description of the state of the laser mode. It also has interesting implications for atom lasers in particular, for which phase dispersion due to self-interactions is expected to be large.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures included. To be published in Phys. Rev. A, as Part II of a two-part paper. The original version of quant-ph/9906125 is shortly to be replaced by a new version which is Part I of the two-part paper. This paper (Part II) also contains some material from the original version of quant-ph/990612

On quantum error-correction by classical feedback in discrete time

We consider the problem of correcting the errors incurred from sending quantum information through a noisy quantum environment by using classical information obtained from a measurement on the environment. For discrete time Markovian evolutions, in the case of fixed measurement on the environment, we give criteria for quantum information to be perfectly corrigible and characterize the related feedback. Then we analyze the case when perfect correction is not possible and, in the qubit case, we find optimal feedback maximizing the channel fidelity.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, revtex

Heterodyne and adaptive phase measurements on states of fixed mean photon number

The standard technique for measuring the phase of a single mode field is heterodyne detection. Such a measurement may have an uncertainty far above the intrinsic quantum phase uncertainty of the state. Recently it has been shown [H. M. Wiseman and R. B. Killip, Phys. Rev. A 57, 2169 (1998)] that an adaptive technique introduces far less excess noise. Here we quantify this difference by an exact numerical calculation of the minimum measured phase variance for the various schemes, optimized over states with a fixed mean photon number. We also analytically derive the asymptotics for these variances. For the case of heterodyne detection our results disagree with the power law claimed by D'Ariano and Paris [Phys. Rev. A 49, 3022 (1994)].Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, minor changes from journal versio

Decoherence-full subsystems and the cryptographic power of a private shared reference frame

We show that private shared reference frames can be used to perform private quantum and private classical communication over a public quantum channel. Such frames constitute a novel type of private shared correlation (distinct from private classical keys or shared entanglement) useful for cryptography. We present optimally efficient schemes for private quantum and classical communication given a finite number of qubits transmitted over an insecure channel and given a private shared Cartesian frame and/or a private shared reference ordering of the qubits. We show that in this context, it is useful to introduce the concept of a decoherence-full subsystem, wherein every state is mapped to the completely mixed state under the action of the decoherence.Comment: 13 pages, published versio

Mixed state discrimination using optimal control

We present theory and experiment for the task of discriminating two nonorthogonal states, given multiple copies. We implement several local measurement schemes, on both pure states and states mixed by depolarizing noise. We find that schemes which are optimal (or have optimal scaling) without noise perform worse with noise than simply repeating the optimal single-copy measurement. Applying optimal control theory, we derive the globally optimal local measurement strategy, which outperforms all other local schemes, and experimentally implement it for various levels of noise.Comment: Corrected ref 1 date; 4 pages & 4 figures + 2 pages & 3 figures supplementary materia