Hyperspherical Close-Coupling Calculation of D-wave Positronium Formation and Excitation Cross Sections in Positron-Hydrogen Scattering

Hyperspherical close-coupling method is used to calculate the elastic, positronium formation and excitation cross sections for positron collisions with atomic hydrogen at energies below the H(n=4) threshold for the J=2 partial wave. The resonances below each inelastic threshold are also analyzed. The adiabatic hyperspherical potential curves are used to identify the nature of these resonances.Comment: 12 pages(in a TeX file) +8 Postscript figure

Globally Optimal Crowdsourcing Quality Management

We study crowdsourcing quality management, that is, given worker responses to a set of tasks, our goal is to jointly estimate the true answers for the tasks, as well as the quality of the workers. Prior work on this problem relies primarily on applying Expectation-Maximization (EM) on the underlying maximum likelihood problem to estimate true answers as well as worker quality. Unfortunately, EM only provides a locally optimal solution rather than a globally optimal one. Other solutions to the problem (that do not leverage EM) fail to provide global optimality guarantees as well. In this paper, we focus on filtering, where tasks require the evaluation of a yes/no predicate, and rating, where tasks elicit integer scores from a finite domain. We design algorithms for finding the global optimal estimates of correct task answers and worker quality for the underlying maximum likelihood problem, and characterize the complexity of these algorithms. Our algorithms conceptually consider all mappings from tasks to true answers (typically a very large number), leveraging two key ideas to reduce, by several orders of magnitude, the number of mappings under consideration, while preserving optimality. We also demonstrate that these algorithms often find more accurate estimates than EM-based algorithms. This paper makes an important contribution towards understanding the inherent complexity of globally optimal crowdsourcing quality management

Sequence-Dependent Effects on the Properties of Semiflexible Biopolymers

Using path integral technique, we show exactly that for a semiflexible biopolymer in constant extension ensemble, no matter how long the polymer and how large the external force, the effects of short range correlations in the sequence-dependent spontaneous curvatures and torsions can be incorporated into a model with well-defined mean spontaneous curvature and torsion as well as a renormalized persistence length. Moreover, for a long biopolymer with large mean persistence length, the sequence-dependent persistence lengths can be replaced by their mean. However, for a short biopolymer or for a biopolymer with small persistence lengths, inhomogeneity in persistence lengths tends to make physical observables very sensitive to details and therefore less predictable

Fast entanglement of two charge-phase qubits through nonadiabatic coupling to a large junction

We propose a theoretical protocol for quantum logic gates between two Josephson junction charge-phase qubits through the control of their coupling to a large junction. In the low excitation limit of the large junction when $E_{J}\gg E_{c}$, it behaves effectively as a quantum data-bus mode of a harmonic oscillator. Our protocol is efficient and fast. In addition, it does not require the data-bus to stay adiabatically in its ground state, as such it can be implemented over a wide parameter regime independent of the data-bus quantum state.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur