Transfer and teleportation of quantum states encoded in decoherence-free subspace

Quantum state transfer and teleportation, with qubits encoded in internal states of the atoms in cavities, among spatially separated nodes of a quantum network in decoherence-free subspace are proposed, based on a cavity-assisted interaction by single-photon pulses. We show in details the implementation of a logic-qubit Hadamard gate and a two-logic-qubit conditional gate, and discuss the experimental feasibility of our scheme.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Acceptable Risk Analysis for Abrupt Environmental Pollution Accidents in Zhangjiakou City, China

Abrupt environmental pollution accidents cause considerable damage worldwide to the ecological environment, human health, and property. The concept of acceptable risk aims to answer whether or not a given environmental pollution risk exceeds a societally determined criterion. This paper presents a case study on acceptable environmental pollution risk conducted through a questionnaire survey carried out between August and October 2014 in five representative districts and two counties of Zhangjiakou City, Hebei Province, China. Here, environmental risk primarily arises from accidental water pollution, accidental air pollution, and tailings dam failure. Based on 870 valid questionnaires, demographic and regional differences in public attitudes towards abrupt environmental pollution risks were analyzed, and risk acceptance impact factors determined. The results showed females, people between 21-40 years of age, people with higher levels of education, public servants, and people with higher income had lower risk tolerance. People with lower perceived risk, low-level risk knowledge, high-level familiarity and satisfaction with environmental management, and without experience of environmental accidents had higher risk tolerance. Multiple logistic regression analysis indicated that public satisfaction with environmental management was the most significant factor in risk acceptance, followed by perceived risk of abrupt air pollution, occupation, perceived risk of tailings dam failure, and sex. These findings should be helpful to local decision-makers concerned with environmental risk management (e.g., selecting target groups for effective risk communication) in the context of abrupt environmental accidents

Accidental Water Pollution Risk Analysis of Mine Tailings Ponds in Guanting Reservoir Watershed, Zhangjiakou City, China

Over the past half century, a surprising number of major pollution incidents occurred due to tailings dam failures. Most previous studies of such incidents comprised forensic analyses of environmental impacts after a tailings dam failure, with few considering the combined pollution risk before incidents occur at a watershed-scale. We therefore propose Watershed-scale Tailings-pond Pollution Risk Analysis (WTPRA), designed for multiple mine tailings ponds, stemming from previous watershed-scale accidental pollution risk assessments. Transferred and combined risk is embedded using risk rankings of multiple routes of the “source-pathway-target” in the WTPRA. The previous approach is modified using multi-criteria analysis, dam failure models, and instantaneous water quality models, which are modified for application to multiple tailings ponds. The study area covers the basin of Gutanting Reservoir (the largest backup drinking water source for Beijing) in Zhangjiakou City, where many mine tailings ponds are located. The resultant map shows that risk is higher downstream of Gutanting Reservoir and in its two tributary basins (i.e., Qingshui River and Longyang River). Conversely, risk is lower in the midstream and upstream reaches. The analysis also indicates that the most hazardous mine tailings ponds are located in Chongli and Xuanhua, and that Guanting Reservoir is the most vulnerable receptor. Sensitivity and uncertainty analyses are performed to validate the robustness of the WTPRA method

Mitigating Code-Reuse Attacks on CISC Architectures in a Hardware Approach

Part 6: Software SecurityInternational audienceRecently, code-reuse attack (CRA) is becoming the most prevalent attack vector which reuses fragments of existing code to make up malicious code. Recent studies show that CRAs especially jump-oriented programming (JOP) attacks are hard and costly to detect and protect from, especially on CISC processors. One reason for this is that the instructions of CISC architecture are of variable-length, and lots of unintended but legal instructions can be exploited by starting from in the middle of a legal instruction. This feature of CISC architectures makes the finding of so called gadgets for CRAs is much easier than that of RISC architectures. Most of previous studies for mitigating CRA on CISC processors rely on software-only means to tackle the unintended instruction problem, which makes their approaches either very costly or can only be applied under restricted conditions. In this paper, we propose two hardware supported techniques. The first, which is the main contribution of this paper, is to eliminate the execution of an unintended instruction. This technique only requires a few modifications to the processor and operating system. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism has little performance impact on the examined SPEC CPU 2006 benchmarks (-0.093% ~2.993%). Second, we propose using hardware control-flow locking as a complementary technique to our protection mechanism. By using the two techniques together, an attacker will have little chance to carry out CRAs on a CISC processor

Controlling the Surface Roughness of Surface-Electrode Ion Trap Based on Micro-Nano Fabrication

The surface-electrode ion trap is one of the most promising devices to realize large-scale and integrated quantum information processing. However, a series of problems are faced in the micro-nano fabrication of surface-electrode ion traps. A prominent one is the difficulty to control the thick film surface roughness. A rough electrode surface could produce excessive radio frequency (RF) loss and deteriorate trapping ability of the surface-electrode ion trap. In this paper, a thick film micro-nano fabrication technology to control the surface roughness is presented, which can reduce the roughness of thick film surface-electrode down to 6.2 nm, while being controllable between 6.2 nm and 45 nm. Therefore, it can also provide a basis for studying the influence of electrode surface roughness on trap performance. The micro-nano fabrication technology is not only suitable for surface-electrode ion traps with various configurations, but also be further applied to researches of MEMS, solar cells and surface science

Association between tumor necrosis factor alpha-238G/a polymorphism and tuberculosis susceptibility: a meta-analysis study

Abstract Background Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) plays a key role in the containment of tuberculosis. The relationship between the TNF -238G/A polymorphism and tuberculosis susceptibility remains inconclusive. A comprehensive meta-analysis was made to provide a more precise estimate of the relationship between them. Methods Multiple search strategies were used. A fixed effect model was takentook to estimate pooled OR with 95% confidence interval (CI) for the association between the TNF -238G/A polymorphism and tuberculosis susceptibility. The Chi-squared-based Q-test and I-squaredI2 statistic were calculated to examine heterogeneity. Begg’s funnel plot and Egger’s test were used to assess publication bias. Results 9 case-control studies were included in this meta-analysis. No significant heterogeneity was demonstrated, and no obvious publication bias was detected among the included studies. The meta-analysis indicated that there was no significant association between the TNF -238G/A polymorphism and tuberculosis susceptibility (GA+AA versus GG model: OR=1.005, 95% CI: 0.765-1.319; A versus G model: OR=1.000, 95% CI: 0.769-1.300). In the subgroup analyses by ethnicity, types of TB and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) status, no significant association were identified. Conclusions The meta-analysis involving 2723 subjects did not detect any association between the TNF -238G/A polymorphism and tuberculosis susceptibility.</p