33 research outputs found
A Comparative Assessment of Water Markets: Insights from the Murray-Darling Basin of Australia and the Western US
Water markets in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) and the US west are compared in terms of their ability to allocate scarce water resources. The study finds that the gains from trade in the MDB are worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Total market turnover in water rights exceeds 4.3 billion (2008 $) spent or committed by urban buyers between 1987 and 2008. The two-market comparison suggests that policy attention should be directed towards ways to promote water trade while simultaneously mitigating the legitimate thirdparty concerns about how and where water is used, especially conflicts between consumptive and in situ uses of water. The study finds that institutional innovation is feasible in both countries and that further understanding about the size, duration, and distribution of third-party effects from water trade, and how these effects might be regulated, can improve water markets to better manage water scarcity.water markets, US west, Murray-Darling Basin, gains from trade
Re-envisioning Addiction Treatment: A Six-Point Plan
This article is focused on improving the quality of addiction treatment. Based on observations that patients are leaving treatment too early and/or are continuing to use substances during their care, the authors propose six actions that could help reorient and revitalize this kind of clinical work: (1) conceptualize and treat addictive disorders within a psychiatric/mental health framework; (2) make the creation of a strong therapeutic alliance a core part of the healing process; (3) understand patients’ addictions and other problems using models based on multiple internal parts, voices, or modes; (4) make contingency management and the use of positive reinforcement systems a standard and central practice in all treatment settings; (5) envision long-term change and healing through the lens of identity theory; and (6) integrate the growing developments in recovery culture with formal treatment
Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger
On 2017 August 17 a binary neutron star coalescence candidate (later designated GW170817) with merger time 12:41:04 UTC was observed through gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor independently detected a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) with a time delay of ~1.7 s with respect to the merger time. From the gravitational-wave signal, the source was initially localized to a sky region of 31 deg2 at a luminosity distance of 40+8-8 Mpc and with component masses consistent with neutron stars. The component masses were later measured to be in the range 0.86 to 2.26 Mo. An extensive observing campaign was launched across the electromagnetic spectrum leading to the discovery of a bright optical transient (SSS17a, now with the IAU identification of AT 2017gfo) in NGC 4993 (at ~40 Mpc) less than 11 hours after the merger by the One- Meter, Two Hemisphere (1M2H) team using the 1 m Swope Telescope. The optical transient was independently detected by multiple teams within an hour. Subsequent observations targeted the object and its environment. Early ultraviolet observations revealed a blue transient that faded within 48 hours. Optical and infrared observations showed a redward evolution over ~10 days. Following early non-detections, X-ray and radio emission were discovered at the transient’s position ~9 and ~16 days, respectively, after the merger. Both the X-ray and radio emission likely arise from a physical process that is distinct from the one that generates the UV/optical/near-infrared emission. No ultra-high-energy gamma-rays and no neutrino candidates consistent with the source were found in follow-up searches. These observations support the hypothesis that GW170817 was produced by the merger of two neutron stars in NGC4993 followed by a short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) and a kilonova/macronova powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the ejecta
TOI-836: A super-Earth and mini-Neptune transiting a nearby K-dwarf
We present the discovery of two exoplanets transiting TOI-836 (TIC 440887364)
using data from TESS Sector 11 and Sector 38. TOI-836 is a bright (
mag), high proper motion ( mas yr), low metallicity
([Fe/H]) K-dwarf with a mass of M and a
radius of R. We obtain photometric follow-up
observations with a variety of facilities, and we use these data-sets to
determine that the inner planet, TOI-836 b, is a R
super-Earth in a 3.82 day orbit, placing it directly within the so-called
'radius valley'. The outer planet, TOI-836 c, is a R
mini-Neptune in an 8.60 day orbit. Radial velocity measurements reveal that
TOI-836 b has a mass of M , while TOI-836 c has a mass
of M. Photometric observations show Transit Timing
Variations (TTVs) on the order of 20 minutes for TOI-836 c, although there are
no detectable TTVs for TOI-836 b. The TTVs of planet TOI-836 c may be caused by
an undetected exterior planet
Measurement-induced entanglement and teleportation on a noisy quantum processor
Measurement has a special role in quantum theory: by collapsing the
wavefunction it can enable phenomena such as teleportation and thereby alter
the "arrow of time" that constrains unitary evolution. When integrated in
many-body dynamics, measurements can lead to emergent patterns of quantum
information in space-time that go beyond established paradigms for
characterizing phases, either in or out of equilibrium. On present-day NISQ
processors, the experimental realization of this physics is challenging due to
noise, hardware limitations, and the stochastic nature of quantum measurement.
Here we address each of these experimental challenges and investigate
measurement-induced quantum information phases on up to 70 superconducting
qubits. By leveraging the interchangeability of space and time, we use a
duality mapping, to avoid mid-circuit measurement and access different
manifestations of the underlying phases -- from entanglement scaling to
measurement-induced teleportation -- in a unified way. We obtain finite-size
signatures of a phase transition with a decoding protocol that correlates the
experimental measurement record with classical simulation data. The phases
display sharply different sensitivity to noise, which we exploit to turn an
inherent hardware limitation into a useful diagnostic. Our work demonstrates an
approach to realize measurement-induced physics at scales that are at the
limits of current NISQ processors
Non-Abelian braiding of graph vertices in a superconducting processor
Indistinguishability of particles is a fundamental principle of quantum
mechanics. For all elementary and quasiparticles observed to date - including
fermions, bosons, and Abelian anyons - this principle guarantees that the
braiding of identical particles leaves the system unchanged. However, in two
spatial dimensions, an intriguing possibility exists: braiding of non-Abelian
anyons causes rotations in a space of topologically degenerate wavefunctions.
Hence, it can change the observables of the system without violating the
principle of indistinguishability. Despite the well developed mathematical
description of non-Abelian anyons and numerous theoretical proposals, the
experimental observation of their exchange statistics has remained elusive for
decades. Controllable many-body quantum states generated on quantum processors
offer another path for exploring these fundamental phenomena. While efforts on
conventional solid-state platforms typically involve Hamiltonian dynamics of
quasi-particles, superconducting quantum processors allow for directly
manipulating the many-body wavefunction via unitary gates. Building on
predictions that stabilizer codes can host projective non-Abelian Ising anyons,
we implement a generalized stabilizer code and unitary protocol to create and
braid them. This allows us to experimentally verify the fusion rules of the
anyons and braid them to realize their statistics. We then study the prospect
of employing the anyons for quantum computation and utilize braiding to create
an entangled state of anyons encoding three logical qubits. Our work provides
new insights about non-Abelian braiding and - through the future inclusion of
error correction to achieve topological protection - could open a path toward
fault-tolerant quantum computing
Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit
Practical quantum computing will require error rates that are well below what
is achievable with physical qubits. Quantum error correction offers a path to
algorithmically-relevant error rates by encoding logical qubits within many
physical qubits, where increasing the number of physical qubits enhances
protection against physical errors. However, introducing more qubits also
increases the number of error sources, so the density of errors must be
sufficiently low in order for logical performance to improve with increasing
code size. Here, we report the measurement of logical qubit performance scaling
across multiple code sizes, and demonstrate that our system of superconducting
qubits has sufficient performance to overcome the additional errors from
increasing qubit number. We find our distance-5 surface code logical qubit
modestly outperforms an ensemble of distance-3 logical qubits on average, both
in terms of logical error probability over 25 cycles and logical error per
cycle ( compared to ). To investigate
damaging, low-probability error sources, we run a distance-25 repetition code
and observe a logical error per round floor set by a single
high-energy event ( when excluding this event). We are able
to accurately model our experiment, and from this model we can extract error
budgets that highlight the biggest challenges for future systems. These results
mark the first experimental demonstration where quantum error correction begins
to improve performance with increasing qubit number, illuminating the path to
reaching the logical error rates required for computation.Comment: Main text: 6 pages, 4 figures. v2: Update author list, references,
Fig. S12, Table I