Drowning

Up and down I went, slowly. I could see the women\u27s legs hanging in the water from a log. I was only four, but I knew something was wrong. The water was a pretty bluish-green color and very quiet, except for the air bubbles that came out of me and the splash of the legs kicking in the water

Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state protocols for fully connected qubit networks

We generalize the recently proposed Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) tripartite protocol [A. Galiautdinov, J. M. Martinis, Phys. Rev. A 78, 010305(R) (2008)] to fully connected networks of weakly coupled qubits interacting by way of anisotropic Heisenberg exchange g(XX+YY)+g1*ZZ. Our model adopted here differs from the more familiar Ising-Heisenberg chain in that here every qubit interacts with every other qubit in the circuit. The assumption of identical couplings on all qubit pairs allows an elegant proof of the protocol for arbitrary N. In order to further make contact with experiment, we study fidelity degradation due to coupling imperfections by numerically simulating the N=3 and N=4 cases. Our simulations indicate that the best fidelity at unequal couplings is achieved when (a) the system is initially prepared in the uniform superposition state (similarly to how it is done in the ideal case), and (b) the entangling time and the final rotations on each of the qubits are appropriately adjusted.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figur

The effect of ionization on the populations of excited levels of C IV and C V in tokamak edge plasmas

The main populating and depopulating mechanisms of the excited energy levels of ions in plasmas with densities <1023-1024 m-3 are electron collisional excitation from the ion's ground state and radiative decay, respectively, with the majority of the electron population being in the ground state of the ionization stage. Electron collisional ionization is predominately expected to take place from one ground state to that of the next higher ionization stage. However, the question arises as to whether, in some cases, ionization can also affect the excited level populations. This would apply particularly to those cases involving transient events such as impurity influxes in a laboratory plasma. An analysis of the importance of ionization in populating the excited levels of ions in plasmas typical of those found in the edge of tokamaks is undertaken for the C IV and C V ionization stages. The emphasis is on those energy levels giving rise to transitions of most use for diagnostic purposes. Carbon is chosen since it is an important contaminant of JET plasmas; it was the dominant low Z impurity before the installation of the ITER-like wall and is still present in the plasma after its installation. Direct electron collisional ionization both from and to excited levels is considered. Distorted-wave Flexible Atomic Code calculations are performed to generate the required ionization cross sections, due to a lack of atomic data in the literature.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures. This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Journal of Physics B. IOP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from i

Trends in stratospheric minor constituents

Photochemical models predict that increasing source gas concentrations are also expected to lead to changes in the concentrations of both catalytically active radical species (such as NO2, ClO, and OH) and inactive reservoir species (such as HNO3, HCl, and H2O). For simplicity, we will refer to all these as trace species. Those species that are expected to have increasing concentration levels are investigated. Additionally, the trace species concentration levels are monitored for unexpected changes on the basis of the measure increase in source gases. Carrying out these investigations is difficult due to the limited data base of measurements of stratospheric trace species. In situ measurements are made only infrequently, and there are few satelliteborne measurements, most over a time space insufficient for trend determination. Instead, ground-based measurements of column content must be used for many species, and interpretation is complicated by contributions from the troposphere or mesosphere or both. In this chapter, we examine existing measurements as published or tabulated

Role of interactions in ferrofluid thermal ratchets

Orientational fluctuations of colloidal particles with magnetic moments may be rectified with the help of external magnetic fields with suitably chosen time dependence. As a result a noise-driven rotation of particles occurs giving rise to a macroscopic torque per volume of the carrier liquid. We investigate the influence of mutual interactions between the particles on this ratchet effect by studying a model system with mean-field interactions. The stochastic dynamics may be described by a nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation for the collective orientation of the particles which we solve approximately by using the effective field method. We determine an interval for the ratio between coupling strength and noise intensity for which a self-sustained rectification of fluctuations becomes possible. The ratchet effect then operates under conditions for which it were impossible in the absence of interactions.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure

Retrograde Melanopsin Signaling Increases With Age in Retinal Degenerate Mice Lacking Rods and the Majority of Cones

PURPOSE: Following on from reports of retrograde retinal signaling in mice, we sought to investigate the influence of age and retinal location on this phenomenon using mice that lack rods and the majority of cones. METHODS: We used functional anatomy for c-fos (Fos) and tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) to measure light-driven activation of dopamine neurons along a dorsal-ventral transect in C3H/He wild-type and rodless-coneless rd/rd cl (rdcl) mice aged 3, 5, and >14 months. A parallel series of retinae from 3-month-old mice was also stained for cone opsins and melanopsin. RESULTS: Analysis by confocal microscopy revealed light-driven Fos activation in TH cells residing in the middorsal retina of the youngest rdcl mice. This region was largely devoid of residual cones but contained a large number of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) and the highest density of melanopsin neurites. With advancing age, there was a paradoxical increase in retrograde signaling from ∼3% Fos-positive (Fos+) TH cells at 3 months to ∼36% in rdcl mice >14 months. This increased activation occurred in more central and peripheral retinal regions. CONCLUSIONS: Our data provide new insights into the anatomy and plasticity of retrograde melanopsin signaling in mice with severe rod/cone dystrophy. The increased retrograde signaling we detect may result from either an increased potency of melanopsin signaling with advancing age and/or postsynaptic modification to dopaminergic neurons