COVID-19 societal response captured by seismic noise in China and Italy

Seismic noise with frequencies above 1 Hz is often called cultural noise and is generally correlated quite well with human activities. Recently, cities in mainland China and Italy imposed lockdown restrictions in response to COVID-19, which gave us an unprecedented opportunity to study the relationship between seismic noise above 1 Hz and human activities. Using seismic records from stations in China and Italy, we show that seismic noise above 1 Hz was primarily generated by the local transportation systems. The lockdown of the cities and the imposition of travel restrictions led to a ~4-12 dB energy decrease in seismic noise in mainland China. Data also show that different Chinese cities experienced distinct periods of diminished cultural noise, related to differences in local response to the epidemic. In contrast, there was only ~1-6 dB energy decrease of seismic noise in Italy, after the country was put under a lockdown. The noise data indicate that traffic flow did not decrease as much in Italy, but show how different cities reacted distinctly to the lockdown conditions

A Contrastive Study of Conceptual Metaphor in Chinese and American Courtroom Discourse

Based on the corpora of 20 Chinese cases from Court Insession and 20 American cases from Famous Trials, the current study aimed to to apply Conceptual Metaphor Theory to carry out a contrastive analysis of the main conceptual metaphors between the two countries’ corpora and further explore the reasons for selecting the same and different conceptual metaphors in the two courtroom discourses. By analyzing the two countries’ corpora, the result showed that life experience and the way of thinking are the main reasons for similarities of the conceptual metaphors between Chinese and American courtroom discourses, while cultural connotation and social environment account for the dissimilarities of the conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American courtroom discourses

Entanglement dynamics in U(1) symmetric hybrid quantum automaton circuits

We study the entanglement dynamics of quantum automaton (QA) circuits in the presence of U(1) symmetry. We find that the second R\'enyi entropy grows diffusively with a logarithmic correction as $\sqrt{t\ln{t}}$, saturating the bound established by Huang [IOP SciNotes 1, 035205 (2020)]. Thanks to the special feature of QA circuits, we understand the entanglement dynamics in terms of a classical bit string model. Specifically, we argue that the diffusive dynamics stems from the rare slow modes containing extensively long domains of spin 0s or 1s. Additionally, we investigate the entanglement dynamics of monitored QA circuits by introducing a composite measurement that preserves both the U(1) symmetry and properties of QA circuits. We find that as the measurement rate increases, there is a transition from a volume-law phase where the second R\'enyi entropy persists the diffusive growth (up to a logarithmic correction) to a critical phase where it grows logarithmically in time. This interesting phenomenon distinguishes QA circuits from non-automaton circuits such as U(1)-symmetric Haar random circuits, where a volume-law to an area-law phase transition exists, and any non-zero rate of projective measurements in the volume-law phase leads to a ballistic growth of the R\'enyi entropy.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figure

Quantum state conversion between continuous variable and qubits systems

We investigate how quantum state can be converted between continuous variable and qubits systems. Non-linear Jaynes-Cumings interaction Hamiltonian is introduced to accomplish the conversion. Detail analysis on the conversion of thermal state exhibits that pretty good fidelity can be achieved.Comment: 6 page