Control of conditional pattern with polarization entanglement

Conditional interference patterns can be obtained with twin photons from spontaneous parametric down-conversion and the phase of the pattern can be controlled by the relative transverse position of the signal and idler detectors. Using a configuration that produces entangled photons in both polarization and transverse momentum we report on the control of the conditional patterns by acting on the polarization degree of freedom.Comment: Submitted for publication in Optics Communication

Fitting isochrones to open cluster photometric data III. Estimating metallicities from UBV photometry

The metallicity is a critical parameter that affects the correct determination fundamental characteristics stellar cluster and has important implications in Galactic and Stellar evolution research. Fewer than 10 % of the 2174 currently catalog open clusters have their metallicity determined in the literature. In this work we present a method for estimating the metallicity of open clusters via non-subjective isochrone fitting using the cross-entropy global optimization algorithm applied to UBV photometric data. The free parameters distance, reddening, age, and metallicity simultaneously determined by the fitting method. The fitting procedure uses weights for the observational data based on the estimation of membership likelihood for each star, which considers the observational magnitude limit, the density profile of stars as a function of radius from the center of the cluster, and the density of stars in multi-dimensional magnitude space. We present results of [Fe/H] for nine well-studied open clusters based on 15 distinct UBV data sets. The [Fe/H] values obtained in the ten cases for which spectroscopic determinations were available in the literature agree, indicating that our method provides a good alternative to determining [Fe/H] by using an objective isochrone fitting. Our results show that the typical precision is about 0.1 dex

The cases of cobalt, cadmium and iron

" The Genomics and Stress Laboratory, at ITQB, headed by Prof. Claudina Rodrigues- Pousada, has been focused on the identification and characterization of stress-responsive genetic programs regulating metal toxicity in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae(...)

The co-evolution of societal issues, technologies and industry regimes: three case studies of the American automobile industry

This thesis contributes to closing a gap in the field of science, technology and innovation (STI) policy research: despite many theoretical advances in the field, we still do not know why some urgent societal issues (or ‘challenges’) remain unaddressed, notwithstanding the technological advances that could potentially address them. In particular, radical technological innovations – innovations that depart from the established technological trajectory – would offer greatest potential to address societal challenges. While the source of radical innovations is often new entrepreneurial firms, established firms (‘incumbents’) are likely to play an important role in developing them because of the vast resources and complementary assets they possess. Incumbents however, face few immediate incentives to develop radical innovations in response to societal challenges. The analytical puzzle of this thesis is thus to explain how, when, and why industries change (or not) their strategies (in particular, their technological strategy) in order to address a societal problem. This puzzle is disentangled into interrelated research questions: A) How do societal issue­‐related pressures (on the incumbent industry) from different domains (namely, civil society, science, political arena, economy) evolve? B) How does the incumbent industry respond to changing pressures around societal issues, in terms of technological, political, cultural and economic strategies? C) In particular, when and why do industry actors decide to develop substantive technological responses? To answer these questions, the thesis develops a new analytical perspective that combines insights from (a) issue life­‐cycle and issue attention cycle theories (from the Business & Society field) with (b) the so­‐called ‘Triple Embeddedness Framework’ and (c) concepts from business strategies, innovation management, corporate political strategies, and technology policy. This novel perspective represents an ideal­‐typical model of issue evolution (‘issue life ­‐cycle’). The model, which I call the Dialectic Issue Life­‐Cycle (DILC) model, is applied to three case studies of the American automobile industry’s responses to various societal problems (local air pollution, auto and highway safety, and climate change). Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods in an original way, the case studies aim not only to investigate the validity of the framework, which also provides conceptual answers to the research questions, but also to further refine it and nuance the conceptual answers. By explaining how incumbent industry actors respond to societal challenges, this thesis ultimately contributes to the practical policy debate of how incumbents can be stimulated to develop radical innovations that help address societal challenges

The Eastward Enlargement of the Eurozone: Trade and FDI

Trade and FDI, Economic Integration

Activity Recognition based on a Magnitude-Orientation Stream Network

The temporal component of videos provides an important clue for activity recognition, as a number of activities can be reliably recognized based on the motion information. In view of that, this work proposes a novel temporal stream for two-stream convolutional networks based on images computed from the optical flow magnitude and orientation, named Magnitude-Orientation Stream (MOS), to learn the motion in a better and richer manner. Our method applies simple nonlinear transformations on the vertical and horizontal components of the optical flow to generate input images for the temporal stream. Experimental results, carried on two well-known datasets (HMDB51 and UCF101), demonstrate that using our proposed temporal stream as input to existing neural network architectures can improve their performance for activity recognition. Results demonstrate that our temporal stream provides complementary information able to improve the classical two-stream methods, indicating the suitability of our approach to be used as a temporal video representation.Comment: 8 pages, SIBGRAPI 201

Explaining ATLAS and CMS Results Within the Reduced Minimal 3-3-1 model

Recently the ATLAS and CMS collaborations announced the discovery of a higgs particle with a mass of $\sim 125$ GeV. The results are mildly consistent with the Standard Model Higgs boson. However, the combined data from these collaborations seem to point to an excess in the $h \rightarrow \gamma \gamma$ channel. In this work we analyze under which conditions this excess may be plausibly explained within the reduced minimal 3-3-1 model, while being consistent with bb, WW, ZZ and $\tau^+\tau^-$ channels. Moreover, we derive the properties of the heavy neutral and the doubly charged scalars predicted by the model. We then conclude that at a scale of a few TeV, this model provides a good fit to the ATLAS and CMS signal strength measurements, and therefore stands as an appealing alternative to the standard model.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures. References adde