Effects of the sintering atmosphere on the superconductivity of SmFeAsO1-xFx compounds

A series of SmFeAsO1-xFx samples were sintered in quartz tubes filled with air of different pressures. The effects of the sintering atmosphere on the superconductivity were systematically investigated. The SmFeAsO1-xFx system maintains a transition temperature (Tc) near 50 K until the concentration of oxygen in quartz tubes increases to a certain threshold, after which Tc decreases dramatically. Fluorine losses, whether due to vaporization, reactions with starting materials, and reactions with oxygen, proved to be detrimental to the superconductivity of this material. The deleterious effects of the oxygen in the sintering atmosphere were also discussed in detail.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Quantum Bit Regeneration

Decoherence and loss will limit the practicality of quantum cryptography and computing unless successful error correction techniques are developed. To this end, we have discovered a new scheme for perfectly detecting and rejecting the error caused by loss (amplitude damping to a reservoir at T=0), based on using a dual-rail representation of a quantum bit. This is possible because (1) balanced loss does not perform a ``which-path'' measurement in an interferometer, and (2) balanced quantum nondemolition measurement of the ``total'' photon number can be used to detect loss-induced quantum jumps without disturbing the quantum coherence essential to the quantum bit. Our results are immediately applicable to optical quantum computers using single photonics devices.Comment: 4 pages, postscript only, figures available at http://feynman.stanford.edu/qcom

Efficient spin control in high-quality-factor planar micro-cavities

A semiconductor microcavity embedding donor impurities and excited by a laser field is modelled. By including general decay and dephasing processes, and in particular cavity photon leakage, detailed simulations show that control over the spin dynamics is significally enhanced in high-quality-factor cavities, in which case picosecond laser pulses may produce spin-flip with high-fidelity final states.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Stability of superfluid Fermi gases in optical lattices

Critical velocities of superfluid Fermi gases in optical lattices are theoretically investigated across the BCS-BEC crossover. We calculate the excitation spectra in the presence of a superfluid flow in one- and two-dimensional optical lattices. It is found that the spectrum of low-lying Anderson-Bogoliubov (AB) mode exhibits a roton-like structure in the short-wavelength region due to the strong charge density wave fluctuations, and with increasing the superfluid velocity one of the roton-like minima reaches zero before the single-particle spectrum does. This means that superfluid Fermi gases in optical lattices are destabilized due to spontaneous emission of the roton-like AB mode instead of due to Cooper pair breaking.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, conference proceeding for ISQM-TOKYO'0

Coating thermal noise of a finite-size cylindrical mirror

Thermal noise of a mirror is one of the limiting noise sources in the high precision measurement such as gravitational-wave detection, and the modeling of thermal noise has been developed and refined over a decade. In this paper, we present a derivation of coating thermal noise of a finite-size cylindrical mirror based on the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. The result agrees to a previous result with an infinite-size mirror in the limit of large thickness, and also agrees to an independent result based on the mode expansion with a thin-mirror approximation. Our study will play an important role not only to accurately estimate the thermal-noise level of gravitational-wave detectors but also to help analyzing thermal noise in quantum-measurement experiments with lighter mirrors.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Nuclear spin-lattice relaxation in ferrimagnetic clusters and chains: A contrast between zero and one dimensions

Motivated by ferrimagnetic oligonuclear and chain compounds synthesized by Caneschi et al., both of which consist of alternating manganese(II) ions and nitronyl-nitroxide radicals, we calculate the nuclear spin-lattice relaxation rate 1/T_1 employing a recently developed modified spin-wave theory. 1/T_1 as a function of temperature drastically varies with the location of probe nuclei in both clusters and chains, though the relaxation time scale is much larger in zero dimension than in one dimension. 1/T_1 as a function of an applied field in long chains forms a striking contrast to that in finite clusters, diverging with decreasing field like inverse square root at low temperatures and logarithmically at high temperatures.Comment: to be published in Phys. Rev. B 68 August 01 (2003

An AB effect without closing a loop

We discuss the consequences of the Aharonov-Bohm effect in setups involving several charged particles, wherein none of the charged particles encloses a closed loop around the magnetic flux. We show that in such setups, the AB phase is encoded either in the relative phase of a bi-partite or multi-partite entangled photons states, or alternatively, gives rise to an overall AB phase that can be measured relative to another reference system. These setups involve processes of annihilation or creation of electron/hole pairs. We discuss the relevance of such effects in "vacuum Birefringence" in QED, and comment on their connection to other known effects.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure