Impurity in the Tomonaga-Luttinger model: a Functional Integral Approach

In this tutorial notes we review a functional bosonization approach in the Keldysh technique to one-dimensional Luttinger liquid in the presence of an impurity.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of LXXXI Les Houches School on "Nanoscopic quantum transport", Les Houches, France, June 28-July 30, 200

Low temperature decoherence and relaxation in charge Josephson-junction qubits

In this lectures, we have described some essential features of loss of coherence by a qubit coupled to the environment. We have first presented well known semiclassical arguments that relate both decoherence and relaxation to the environmental noise. Then we have shown that models with pure decoherence (but no relaxation in qubit states) can be exactly solvable. As an example, we have treated in detail the model of fluctuating background charges which is believed to describe one of the most important channels for decoherence for the charge Josephson junction qubit. We have shown that the decoherence rate saturates at `high' temperatures while becoming linear in T at low temperatures and showing in all regimes a non-monotonic behaviour as a function of the coupling of the qubit to the fluctuating background charges. We have also considered, albeit only perturbatively, the qubit relaxation by the background charges and demonstrated that a quasi-linear behaviour of the spectral density of noise deduced from the measurements of the relaxation rate can be qualitatively explained.Comment: Lecture notes for International workshop on mesoscopic and nanoscopic systems, Kolkata, India, February 2006, to be published by Springe

The art of algorithmic guessing in gfun\texttt{gfun}

The technique of guessing can be very fruitful when dealing with sequences which arise in practice. This holds true especially when guessing is performed algorithmically and efficiently. One highly useful tool for this purpose is the package named $\texttt{gfun}$ in the software Maple. In this text we explore and explain some of $\texttt{gfun}$'s possibilities and illustrate them on two examples from recent mathematical research by the author and his collaborators

Algebraicity of hypergeometric functions with arbitrary parameters

We provide a complete classification of the algebraicity of (generalized) hypergeometric functions with no restriction on the set of their parameters. Our characterization relies on the interlacing criteria of Christol (1987) and Beukers-Heckman~(1989) for globally bounded and algebraic hypergeometric functions, however in a more general setting which allows arbitrary complex parameters with possibly integral differences. We also showcase the adapted criterion on a variety of different examples.Comment: 21 page