A nonlinear Ramsey interferometer operating beyond the Heisenberg limit

We show that a dynamically evolving two-mode Bose-Einstein condensate (TBEC) with an adiabatic, time-varying Raman coupling maps exactly onto a nonlinear Ramsey interferometer that includes a nonlinear medium. Assuming a realistic quantum state for the TBEC, namely the SU(2) coherent spin state, we find that the measurement uncertainty of the ``path-difference'' phase shift scales as the standard quantum limit (1/N^{1/2}) where N is the number of atoms, while that for the interatomic scattering strength scales as 1/N^{7/5}, overcoming the Heisenberg limit of 1/N.Comment: 4 figures. Submitted for publicatio

Ehrenfest Dynamics and Frictionless Cooling Methods

Recently introduced methods which result in shortcuts to adiabaticity, particularly in the context of frictionless cooling, are rederived and discussed in the framework of an approach based on Ehrenfest dynamics. This construction provides physical insights into the emergence of the Ermakov equation, the choice of its boundary conditions, and the use of minimum uncertainty states as indicators of the efficiency of the procedure. Additionally, it facilitates the extension of frictionless cooling to more general situations of physical relevance, such as optical dipole trapping schemes. In this context, we discuss frictionless cooling in the short-time limit, a complementary case to the one considered in the literature, making explicit the limitations intrinsic to the technique when the full three-dimensional case is analyzed.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, v2: To appear in Physical Review A. (some minor typos corrected and some references added

Idiopathic arterial calcification of infancy : a case report

Idiopathic arterial calcification of infancy is a rare condition characterized by extensive calcification and stenosis of large and medium sized arteries. A ten day old female baby developed sudden shortness of breath and was treated with oxygen and antibiotics. Antenatal echocardiography showed calcification of the aorta and pulmonary arteries. Autopsy examination revealed extensive calcification in the walls of major arteries and vessels of several organs. The baby was found to have a karyotype of 47 chromosomes.peer-reviewe

Squeezing and robustness of frictionless cooling strategies

Quantum control strategies that provide shortcuts to adiabaticity are increasingly considered in various contexts including atomic cooling. Recent studies have emphasized practical issues in order to reduce the gap between the idealized models and actual ongoing implementations. We rephrase here the cooling features in terms of a peculiar squeezing effect, and use it to parametrize the robustness of frictionless cooling techniques with respect to noise-induced deviations from the ideal time-dependent trajectory for the trapping frequency. We finally discuss qualitative issues for the experimental implementation of this scheme using bichromatic optical traps and lattices, which seem especially suitable for cooling Fermi-Bose mixtures and for investigating equilibration of negative temperature states, respectively.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures; To appear in Physical Review

An Atom Laser is not monochromatic

We study both numerically and analytically the possibility of using an adiabatic passage control method to construct a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) for Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in the time domain, in exact one-to-one correspondence with the traditional optical MZI that involves two beam splitters and two mirrors. The interference fringes one obtains from such a minimum-disturbance set up clearly demonstrates that, fundamentally, an atom laser is not monochromatic due to interatomic interactions. We also consider how the amount of entanglement in the system correlates to the interference fringes.Comment: 4 figures. Submitted for publicatio

Hook-content formulae for symplectic and orthogonal tableaux

By considering the specialisation $s_{\lambda}(1,q,q^2,...,q^{n-1})$ of the Schur function, Stanley was able to describe a formula for the number of semistandard Young tableaux of shape $\lambda$ in terms of two properties of the boxes in the diagram for $\lambda$. Using specialisations of symplectic and orthogonal Schur functions, we derive corresponding formulae, first given by El Samra and King, for the number of semistandard symplectic and orthogonal $\lambda$-tableaux.Comment: Withdrawn; paper is outdate

Spanning trees short or small

We study the problem of finding small trees. Classical network design problems are considered with the additional constraint that only a specified number $k$ of nodes are required to be connected in the solution. A prototypical example is the $k$MST problem in which we require a tree of minimum weight spanning at least $k$ nodes in an edge-weighted graph. We show that the $k$MST problem is NP-hard even for points in the Euclidean plane. We provide approximation algorithms with performance ratio $2\sqrt{k}$ for the general edge-weighted case and $O(k^{1/4})$ for the case of points in the plane. Polynomial-time exact solutions are also presented for the class of decomposable graphs which includes trees, series-parallel graphs, and bounded bandwidth graphs, and for points on the boundary of a convex region in the Euclidean plane. We also investigate the problem of finding short trees, and more generally, that of finding networks with minimum diameter. A simple technique is used to provide a polynomial-time solution for finding $k$-trees of minimum diameter. We identify easy and hard problems arising in finding short networks using a framework due to T. C. Hu.Comment: 27 page