Entanglement entropy and D1-D5 geometries

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.066004Giusto, Stefano, and Rodolfo Russo. "Entanglement Entropy and D1-D5 geometries." Physical Review D 90.6 (2014): 066004

Between Smartphones and Tablets: Improving Teacher Education Programmes through Mobile Devices

This research was conducted at the University of Genoa (Italy). The student teachers attended a course focused on the use of mobile devices at school. We tried to examine the impact of mobile learning on university activities for pre-service teachers, the changes in the organization of their studying, the changes in their learning strategies, and the changes in their interaction/cooperation levels. After the course, we administered a questionnaire with both closed-ended and open-ended questions, which highlighted important findings concerning the differences between smartphones and tablets in supporting these aspects of their learning. We found that both types of devices improved interaction and cooperation among students, and being able to search for information was useful for studying. However, changes in the organization of studying and the learning strategies were supported only by tablets and only for specific aspects of learning. This study suggests solutions to improve Italian teacher education programmes and the quality of university activitie

Gauge dependence in topological gauge theories

We parametrize the gauge-fixing freedom in choosing the Lagrangian of a topological gauge theory. We compute the gauge-fixing dependence of correlators of equivariant operators when the compactified moduli space has a non-empty boundary and verify that only a subset of these has a gauge independent meaning. We analyze in detail a simple example of such anomalous topological theories, 4D topological Yang-Mills on the four-sphere and instanton number k=1.Comment: 12 pages, TeX , harvma

Urban mobility services based on user virtualization and social IoT

Smart cities are characterized by smart heterogeneous devices that can interact and cooperate with each other by exchanging regularly low amounts of data in the context of IoT. Lately, there has been an increasing interest in enhancing the IoT paradigm to support exchange of multimedia data. This paper focuses on the concept of Urban Mobility Services and in particular on proposing a solution to enable best QoS and load balance in a 5G network context. The paper introduces a novel algorithm for MobilIty Services uSer vIrtualizatiON (MISSION). MISSION employs cloud computing and broadcast of multimedia content in order to reduce the network load, the number of interactions, and user device energy consumption. It also relies on rating of network reputation in the 5G heterogeneous network environment and performing network selection in the quest to maximize QoS parameters. The performance of the proposed solution is compared against that of a TraffictYpe-based DifferEntiated Reputation (TYDER) algorithm. This performance was evaluated in terms of QoS parameters such as delay, latency, packet loss and prediction error. The results show how MISSION outperforms TYDER in urban mobility scenario

Carbon nitride-coated transparent glass vials as photoinitiators for radical polymerization

Benign polymerization routes offer new perspectives in current polymer technology. Especially for automated or continuous flow synthesis of polymers, new devices and principles have to be considered by the means of minimizing addition or separation sequences as well as the type of a polymer initiation. Near-UV and visible light-induced polymerization utilizing metal-free semiconductor polymeric carbon nitride (pCN) as heterogeneous photocatalyst was a first step into this direction. Moving from heterogeneous powder catalysis (which still requests catalyst separation) to surface photocatalysis via coating glass tubes or vials with pCN thin films is presented. Performance and effectivity of those photoactive reactors are proven by free radical photopolymerization of variety of monomers. Reusability of vials is demonstrated via reversible addition-fragmentation chain-transfer polymerization-assisted block copolymer synthesis. This strategy eliminates the necessity of adding or removing initiators, works at room temperature, and offers a platform for cheap and effective polymer synthesis at the age of automated synthesis