Automatic collision avoidance of ships

One of the key elements in automatic simulation of ship manoeuvring in confined waterways is route finding and collision avoidance. This paper presents a new practical method of automatic trajectory planning and collision avoidance based on an artificial potential field and speed vector. Collision prevention regulations and international navigational rules have been incorporated into the algorithm. The algorithm is fairly straightforward and simple to implement, but has been shown to be effective in finding safe paths for all ships concerned in complex situations. The method has been applied to some typical test cases and the results are very encouraging

Simple unconventional geometric scenario of one-way quantum computation with superconducting qubits inside a cavity

We propose a simple unconventional geometric scenario to achieve a kind of nontrivial multi-qubit operations with superconducting charge qubits placed in a microwave cavity. The proposed quantum operations are insensitive not only to the thermal state of cavity mode but also to certain random operation errors, and thus may lead to high-fidelity quantum information processing. Executing the designated quantum operations, a class of highly entangled cluster states may be generated efficiently in the present scalable solid-state system, enabling one to achieve one-way quantum computation.Comment: Accepted version with minor amendments. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Engineering graphene by oxidation: a first principles study

Graphene epoxide, with oxygen atoms lining up on pristine graphene sheets, is investigated theoretically in this Letter. Two distinct phases: metastable clamped and unzipped structures are unveiled in consistence with experiments. In the stable (unzipped) phase, epoxy group breaks underneath sp2 bond and modifies the mechanical and electronic properties of graphene remarkably. The foldable epoxy ring structure reduces its Young's modulus by 42.4%, while leaves the tensile strength almost unchanged. Epoxidation also perturbs the pi state and opens semiconducting gap for both phases, with dependence on the density of epoxidation. In the unzipped structures, localized states revealed near the Fermi level resembles the edge states in graphene nanoribbons. The study reported here paves the way for oxidation-based functionalization of graphene-related materials.Comment: 17 pages (4 figures, 1 table

Universal holonomic quantum gates in decoherence-free subspace on superconducting circuits

To implement a set of universal quantum logic gates based on non-Abelian geometric phases, it is a conventional wisdom that quantum systems beyond two levels are required, which is extremely difficult to fulfil for superconducting qubits, appearing to be a main reason why only single qubit gates was implemented in a recent experiment [A. A. Abdumalikov Jr \emph{et al}., Nature 496, 482 (2013)]. Here we propose to realize non-adiabatic holonomic quantum computation in decoherence-free subspace on circuit QED, where one can use only the two levels in transmon qubits, a usual interaction, and a minimal resource for the decoherence-free subspace encoding. In particular, our scheme not only overcomes the difficulties encountered in previous studies, but also can still achieve considerably large effective coupling strength, such that high fidelity quantum gates can be achieved. Therefore, the present scheme makes it very promising way to realize robust holonomic quantum computation with superconducting circuits.Comment: V4: published version; V1: submitted on April

Short note on two output-dependent hidden Markov models

The purpose of this note is to study the assumption of mutual information independence", which is used by Zhou (2005) for deriving an output-dependent hidden Markov model, the so-called discriminative HMM (D-HMM), in the context of determining a stochastic optimal sequence of hidden states. The assumption is extended to derive its generative counterpart, the G-HMM. In addition, state-dependent representations for two output-dependent HMMs, namely HMMSDO (Li, 2005) and D-HMM, are presented