Social interaction of patients and personnel in a ward situation

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Aharonov-Bohm Effect and Coordinate Transformations

Resorting to a Gedankenexperiment which is very similar to the famous Aharonov-Bohm proposal it will be shown that, in the case of a Minkowskian spacetime, we may use a nonrelativistic quantum particle and a noninertial coordinate system and obtain geometric information of regions that are, to this particle, forbidden. This shows that the outcome of a nonrelativistic quantum process is determined not only by the features of geometry at those points at which the process takes place, but also by geometric parameters of regions in which the quantum system can not enter. From this fact we could claim that geometry at the quantum level plays a non-local role. Indeed, the measurement outputs of some nonrelativistic quantum experiments are determined not only by the geometry of the region in which the experiment takes place, but also by the geometric properties of spacetime volumes which are, in some way, forbidden in the experiment.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, accepted in Mod. Phys. Letts.

Group-theoretical structure of quantum measurements and equivalence principle

The transverse group associated to some continuous quantum measuring processes is analyzed in the presence of nonvanishing gravitational fields. This is done considering, as an exmaple, the case of a particle whose coordinates are being monitored. Employing the so called restricted path integral formalism, it will be shown that the measuring process could always contain information concerning the gravitational field. In other words, it seems that with the presence of a measuring process the equivalence principle may, in some cases, break down. The relation between the breakdown of the equivalence principle, at quantum level, and the fact that the gravitational field could act always as a decoherence environment, is also considered. The phenomena of quantum beats of quantum optics will allow us to consider the possibility that the experimental corroboration of the equivalence principle at quantum level could be taken as an indirect evidence in favor of the quantization of the gravitational field, i.e., the quantum properties of this field avoid the violation of the equivalence principle.Comment: 13 pages, accepted in Modern Physics Letters

A General Transfer-Function Approach to Noise Filtering in Open-Loop Quantum Control

We present a general transfer-function approach to noise filtering in open-loop Hamiltonian engineering protocols for open quantum systems. We show how to identify a computationally tractable set of fundamental filter functions, out of which arbitrary transfer filter functions may be assembled up to arbitrary high order in principle. Besides avoiding the infinite recursive hierarchy of filter functions that arises in general control scenarios, this fundamental filter-functions set suffices to characterize the error suppression capabilities of the control protocol in both the time and frequency domain. We prove that the resulting notion of filtering order reveals conceptually distinct, albeit complementary, features of the controlled dynamics as compared to the order of error cancellation, traditionally defined in the Magnus sense. Examples and implications are discussed.Comment: Paper plus supplementary material. 10 pages, 1 figure. Unnumbered equation between 2 and 3 corrected. Results are unchange

Arbitrarily Accurate Dynamical Control in Open Quantum Systems

We show that open-loop dynamical control techniques may be used to synthesize unitary transformations in open quantum systems in such a way that decoherence is perturbatively compensated for to a desired (in principle arbitrarily high) level of accuracy, which depends only on the strength of the relevant errors and the achievable rate of control modulation. Our constructive and fully analytical solution employs concatenated dynamically corrected gates, and is applicable independently of detailed knowledge of the system-environment interactions and environment dynamics. Explicit implications for boosting quantum gate fidelities in realistic scenarios are addressed.Comment: 4 pages and 20 characters, 1 figure [improvements and fixes, PRL version

Description of Quantum Entanglement with Nilpotent Polynomials

We propose a general method for introducing extensive characteristics of quantum entanglement. The method relies on polynomials of nilpotent raising operators that create entangled states acting on a reference vacuum state. By introducing the notion of tanglemeter, the logarithm of the state vector represented in a special canonical form and expressed via polynomials of nilpotent variables, we show how this description provides a simple criterion for entanglement as well as a universal method for constructing the invariants characterizing entanglement. We compare the existing measures and classes of entanglement with those emerging from our approach. We derive the equation of motion for the tanglemeter and, in representative examples of up to four-qubit systems, show how the known classes appear in a natural way within our framework. We extend our approach to qutrits and higher-dimensional systems, and make contact with the recently introduced idea of generalized entanglement. Possible future developments and applications of the method are discussed.Comment: 40 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, submitted for publication. v2: section II.E has been changed and the Appendix on "Four qubit sl-entanglement measure" has been removed. There are changes in the notation of section IV. Typos and language mistakes has been corrected. A figure has been added and a figure has been replaced. The references have been update

Asymmetric Totally-corrective Boosting for Real-time Object Detection

Real-time object detection is one of the core problems in computer vision. The cascade boosting framework proposed by Viola and Jones has become the standard for this problem. In this framework, the learning goal for each node is asymmetric, which is required to achieve a high detection rate and a moderate false positive rate. We develop new boosting algorithms to address this asymmetric learning problem. We show that our methods explicitly optimize asymmetric loss objectives in a totally corrective fashion. The methods are totally corrective in the sense that the coefficients of all selected weak classifiers are updated at each iteration. In contract, conventional boosting like AdaBoost is stage-wise in that only the current weak classifier's coefficient is updated. At the heart of the totally corrective boosting is the column generation technique. Experiments on face detection show that our methods outperform the state-of-the-art asymmetric boosting methods.Comment: 14 pages, published in Asian Conf. Computer Vision 201

Quantum tensor product structures are observable-induced

It is argued that the partition of a quantum system into subsystems is dictated by the set of operationally accessible interactions and measurements. The emergence of a multi-partite tensor product structure of the state-space and the associated notion of quantum entanglement are then relative and observable-induced. We develop a general algebraic framework aimed to formalize this concept. We discuss several cases relevant to quantum information processing and decoherence control.Comment: 5 Pages LaTe

Dynamically Error-Corrected Gates for Universal Quantum Computation

Scalable quantum computation in realistic devices requires that precise control can be implemented efficiently in the presence of decoherence and operational errors. We propose a general constructive procedure for designing robust unitary gates on an open quantum system without encoding or measurement overhead. Our results allow for a low-level error correction strategy solely based on Hamiltonian engineering using realistic bounded-strength controls and may substantially reduce implementation requirements for fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Fault-Tolerant Quantum Dynamical Decoupling

Dynamical decoupling pulse sequences have been used to extend coherence times in quantum systems ever since the discovery of the spin-echo effect. Here we introduce a method of recursively concatenated dynamical decoupling pulses, designed to overcome both decoherence and operational errors. This is important for coherent control of quantum systems such as quantum computers. For bounded-strength, non-Markovian environments, such as for the spin-bath that arises in electron- and nuclear-spin based solid-state quantum computer proposals, we show that it is strictly advantageous to use concatenated, as opposed to standard periodic dynamical decoupling pulse sequences. Namely, the concatenated scheme is both fault-tolerant and super-polynomially more efficient, at equal cost. We derive a condition on the pulse noise level below which concatenated is guaranteed to reduce decoherence.Comment: 5 pages, 4 color eps figures. v3: Minor changes. To appear in Phys. Rev. Let