Quantum seals

A quantum seal is a way of encoding a message into quantum states, so that anybody may read the message with little error, while authorized verifiers can detect that the seal has been broken. We present a simple extension to the Bechmann-Pasquinucci majority-voting scheme that is impervious to coherent attacks, and further, encompasses sealing quantum messages by means of quantum encryption. The scheme is relatively easy to implement, requiring neither entanglement nor controlled operations during the state preparation, reading or verification stages.Comment: To appear in Physica Scripta, 4 page

Screening of certain Ayurvedic plants extracts against E. turcicum

The use of chemicals against pathogens is environmentally dangerous, so use of natural inhibitors for disease management is needed. In this work we screen botanical extracts from ayurvedic plants for their antifungal properties against economically important plant fungal pathogen. As a test fungal pathogen, we select E. turcicum, a potent fungal pathogen responsible for Northern leaf corn blight of Maize. This fungal pathogen was challenged by the leaf extract prepared from certain Ayurvedic plants and these observations have shown a promising future in biocontrol of fungus by using such environmentally friendly
antifungal agents

Index Policies for Optimal Mean-Variance Trade-Off of Inter-delivery Times in Real-Time Sensor Networks

A problem of much current practical interest is the replacement of the wiring infrastructure connecting approximately 200 sensor and actuator nodes in automobiles by an access point. This is motivated by the considerable savings in automobile weight, simplification of manufacturability, and future upgradability. A key issue is how to schedule the nodes on the shared access point so as to provide regular packet delivery. In this and other similar applications, the mean of the inter-delivery times of packets, i.e., throughput, is not sufficient to guarantee service-regularity. The time-averaged variance of the inter-delivery times of packets is also an important metric. So motivated, we consider a wireless network where an Access Point schedules real-time generated packets to nodes over a fading wireless channel. We are interested in designing simple policies which achieve optimal mean-variance tradeoff in interdelivery times of packets by minimizing the sum of time-averaged means and variances over all clients. Our goal is to explore the full range of the Pareto frontier of all weighted linear combinations of mean and variance so that one can fully exploit the design possibilities. We transform this problem into a Markov decision process and show that the problem of choosing which node's packet to transmit in each slot can be formulated as a bandit problem. We establish that this problem is indexable and explicitly derive the Whittle indices. The resulting Index policy is optimal in certain cases. We also provide upper and lower bounds on the cost for any policy. Extensive simulations show that Index policies perform better than previously proposed policies