Entangled states close to the maximally mixed state

We give improved upper bounds on the radius of the largest ball of separable states of an m-qubit system around the maximally mixed state. The ratio between the upper bound and the best known lower bound (Hildebrand, quant.ph/0601201) thus shrinks to a constant c = \sqrt{34/27} ~ 1.122, as opposed to a term of order \sqrt{m\log m} for the best upper bound known previously (Aubrun and Szarek, quant.ph/0503221). We give concrete examples of separable states on the boundary to entanglement which realize these upper bounds. As a by-product, we compute the radii of the largest balls that fit into the projective tensor product of four unit balls in R^3 and in the projective tensor product of an arbitrary number of unit balls in R^n for n = 2,4,8.Comment: 11 pages; v2: n qubit case adde

Conformational changes in glycine tri- and hexapeptide

We have investigated the potential energy surfaces for glycine chains consisting of three and six amino acids. For these molecules we have calculated potential energy surfaces as a function of the Ramachandran angles phi and psi, which are widely used for the characterization of the polypeptide chains. These particular degrees of freedom are essential for the characterization of proteins folding process. Calculations have been carried out within ab initio theoretical framework based on the density functional theory and accounting for all the electrons in the system. We have determined stable conformations and calculated the energy barriers for transitions between them. Using a thermodynamic approach, we have estimated the times of the characteristic transitions between these conformations. The results of our calculations have been compared with those obtained by other theoretical methods and with the available experimental data extracted from the Protein Data Base. This comparison demonstrates a reasonable correspondence of the most prominent minima on the calculated potential energy surfaces to the experimentally measured angles phi and psi for the glycine chains appearing in native proteins. We have also investigated the influence of the secondary structure of polypeptide chains on the formation of the potential energy landscape. This analysis has been performed for the sheet and the helix conformations of chains of six amino acids.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figure

Dynamical Casimir effect in oscillating media

We show that oscillations of a homogeneous medium with constant material coefficients produce pairs of photons. Classical analysis of an oscillating medium reveals regions of parametric resonance where the electromagnetic waves are exponentially amplified. The quantum counterpart of parametric resonance is an exponentially growing number of photons in the same parameter regions. This process may be viewed as another manifestation of the dynamical Casimir effect. However, in contrast to the standard dynamical Casimir effect, photon production here takes place in the entire volume and is not due to time dependence of the boundary conditions or material constants