Financing Europe's Fast Movers. Bruegel Policy Brief 2008/01, January 2008

Summary. Arguments about structural policies in Europe, including the EU’s Lisbon strategy, put a legitimate emphasis on labour and product market reforms, but often overlook the role of the financial system in fostering innovation and growth. Corporate finance is crucial for the emergence of new companies, well beyond the much-analysed technology sector. In a knowledge economy where companies rely less on physical investment, traditional bank loans are insufficient. While Europe has a world-class financial system for established companies, new instruments tailored to the needs of emerging firms remain underdeveloped in most EU countries

The mirror conjecture for minuscule flag varieties

We prove Rietsch's mirror conjecture that the Dubrovin quantum connection for minuscule flag varieties is isomorphic to the character D-module of the Berenstein-Kazhdan geometric crystal. The idea is to recognize the quantum connection as Galois and the geometric crystal as automorphic. We reveal surprising relations with the works of Frenkel-Gross, Heinloth-Ng\^o-Yun and Zhu on Kloosterman sheaves. The isomorphism comes from global rigidity results where Hecke eigensheaves are determined by their local ramification. As corollaries we obtain combinatorial identities for counts of rational curves and the Peterson variety presentation of the small quantum cohomology ring

Combinatorial substitutions and sofic tilings

A combinatorial substitution is a map over tilings which allows to define sets of tilings with a strong hierarchical structure. In this paper, we show that such sets of tilings are sofic, that is, can be enforced by finitely many local constraints. This extends some similar previous results (Mozes'90, Goodman-Strauss'98) in a much shorter presentation.Comment: 17 pages, 16 figures. In proceedings of JAC 201

Purification of single-photon entanglement with linear optics

We show that single-photon entangled states of the form |0>|1>+|1>|0> can be purified with a simple linear-optics based protocol, which is eminently feasible with current technology. Besides its conceptual interest, this result is relevant for attractive quantum repeater protocols.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Security of Quantum Key Distribution with Entangled Qutrits

The study of quantum cryptography and quantum non-locality have traditionnally been based on two-level quantum systems (qubits). In this paper we consider a generalisation of Ekert's cryptographic protocol [Ekert] where qubits are replaced by qutrits. The security of this protocol is related to non-locality, in analogy with Ekert's protocol. In order to study its robustness against the optimal individual attacks, we derive the information gained by a potential eavesdropper applying a cloning-based attack.Comment: 9 pages original version: july 2002, replaced in january 2003 (reason: minor changes

Rational curves on homogeneous cones

Let G/Q be an homogeneous variety embedded in a projective space P thanks to an ample line bundle L. Take a projective space containing P and form the cone X over G/Q, we call this a cone over an homogeneous variety. Let $\alpha$ a class of 1-cycle on X. In this article we describe the irreducible components of the scheme of morphisms of class $\alpha$ from a rational curve to X. The situation depends on the line bundle L : if the projectivised tangent space to the vertex contains lines (i.e. if G/Q contains lines in P) then the irreducible components are described as in our paper math.AG/0407123 by the difference between Cartier and Weil divisors. On the contrary if there is no line in the projectivised tangent space to the vertex then there are new irreducible components corresponding to the multiplicity of the curve through the vertex. As in math.AG/0407123 we use a resolution Y of X (the blowing-up) and study the curves on Y.Comment: In english, 13 page