Exploration of the Federal Communications Commission’s Experimental Radio Service (ERS): Understanding ten years of experimental spectrum licenses

The Experimental Radio Service (ERS) of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has awarded experimental licenses for more than thirty years as a means to promote research and innovation in wireless technologies. In this work, we present an exploratory analysis of the details pertaining to the assignment of these licenses during the past ten years (2007-2016). For this purpose, we have built a single repository of technical and non-technical details about license applications by scraping publicly available information in the FCC’s website. This has permitted us systematically categorize among the existing types of experimental licenses and, subsequently, analyze their characteristics. We pay particular attention to the evolution of various parameters such as duration of license, frequency of assignment, processing times, operational parameters, among others. In addition, we explore potential trends hidden in ten years of experimental licenses. This allow us to better understand the time burden of obtaining an authorization or the factors that may influence the license granting process.We conclude this work by delving into the details behind the relationship between ERS authorizations and well known wireless technologies, in particular TV White Spaces and 5G

Fractal Conductance Fluctuations in Gold--Nanowires

A detailed analysis of magneto-conductance fluctuations of quasiballistic gold-nanowires of various lengths is presented. We find that the variance $=$ when analyzed for $\Delta B$ much smaller than the correlation field $B_c$ varies according to $<(\Delta G)^2>\propto \Delta B^{\gamma}$ with $\gamma < 2$ indicating that the graph of $G$ vs. $B$ is fractal. We attribute this behavior to the existence of long-lived states arising from chaotic trajectories trapped close to regular classical orbits. We find that $\gamma$ decreases with increasing length of the wires.Comment: 5 pages, Revtex with epsf, 4 Postscript figures, final version accepted as Phys. Rev. Let

Entanglement and Nonunitary Evolution

We consider a collapsing relativistic spherical shell for a free quantum field. Once the center of the wavefunction of the shell passes a certain radius R, the degrees of freedom inside R are traced over. We show that an observer outside this region will determine that the evolution of the system is nonunitary. We argue that this phenomenon is generic to entangled systems, and discuss a possible relation to black hole physics.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure; Added a clarification regarding the relation with black hole physic

Unstable decay and state selection II

The decay of unstable states when several metastable states are available for occupation is investigated using path-integral techniques. Specifically, a method is described which allows the probabilities with which the metastable states are occupied to be calculated by finding optimal paths, and fluctuations about them, in the weak noise limit. The method is illustrated on a system described by two coupled Langevin equations, which are found in the study of instabilities in fluid dynamics and superconductivity. The problem involves a subtle interplay between non-linearities and noise, and a naive approximation scheme which does not take this into account is shown to be unsatisfactory. The use of optimal paths is briefly reviewed and then applied to finding the conditional probability of ending up in one of the metastable states, having begun in the unstable state. There are several aspects of the calculation which distinguish it from most others involving optimal paths: (i) the paths do not begin and end on an attractor, and moreover, the final point is to a large extent arbitrary, (ii) the interplay between the fluctuations and the leading order contribution are at the heart of the method, and (iii) the final result involves quantities which are not exponentially small in the noise strength. This final result, which gives the probability of a particular state being selected in terms of the parameters of the dynamics, is remarkably simple and agrees well with the results of numerical simulations. The method should be applicable to similar problems in a number of other areas such as state selection in lasers, activationless chemical reactions and population dynamics in fluctuating environments.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Stochastic Gravity: A Primer with Applications

Stochastic semiclassical gravity of the 90's is a theory naturally evolved from semiclassical gravity of the 70's and 80's. It improves on the semiclassical Einstein equation with source given by the expectation value of the stress-energy tensor of quantum matter fields in curved spacetimes by incorporating an additional source due to their fluctuations. In stochastic semiclassical gravity the main object of interest is the noise kernel, the vacuum expectation value of the (operator-valued) stress-energy bi-tensor, and the centerpiece is the (stochastic) Einstein-Langevin equation. We describe this new theory via two approaches: the axiomatic and the functional. The axiomatic approach is useful to see the structure of the theory from the framework of semiclassical gravity. The functional approach uses the Feynman-Vernon influence functional and the Schwinger-Keldysh close-time-path effective action methods which are convenient for computations. It also brings out the open systems concepts and the statistical and stochastic contents of the theory such as dissipation, fluctuations, noise and decoherence. We then describe the application of stochastic gravity to the backreaction problems in cosmology and black hole physics. Intended as a first introduction to this subject, this article places more emphasis on pedagogy than completeness.Comment: 46 pages Latex. Intended as a review in {\it Classical and Quantum Gravity

Deterministic polarization chaos from a laser diode

Fifty years after the invention of the laser diode and fourty years after the report of the butterfly effect - i.e. the unpredictability of deterministic chaos, it is said that a laser diode behaves like a damped nonlinear oscillator. Hence no chaos can be generated unless with additional forcing or parameter modulation. Here we report the first counter-example of a free-running laser diode generating chaos. The underlying physics is a nonlinear coupling between two elliptically polarized modes in a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser. We identify chaos in experimental time-series and show theoretically the bifurcations leading to single- and double-scroll attractors with characteristics similar to Lorenz chaos. The reported polarization chaos resembles at first sight a noise-driven mode hopping but shows opposite statistical properties. Our findings open up new research areas that combine the high speed performances of microcavity lasers with controllable and integrated sources of optical chaos.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Enhanced Hsp70 Expression Protects against Acute Lung Injury by Modulating Apoptotic Pathways

The Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a highly lethal inflammatory lung disorder. Apoptosis plays a key role in its pathogenesis. We showed that an adenovirus expressing the 70 kDa heat shock protein Hsp70 (AdHSP) protected against sepsis-induced lung injury. In this study we tested the hypothesis that AdHSP attenuates apoptosis in sepsis-induced lung injury

Transversity distributions in the nucleon in the large-N_c limit

We compute the quark and antiquark transversity distributions in the nucleon at a low normalization point of 600 MeV in the large-$N_c$ limit, where the nucleon can be described as a soliton of an effective chiral theory (chiral quark-soliton model). The flavor-nonsinglet distributions, $\delta u(x) - \delta d(x)$ and $\delta\bar u(x) - \delta\bar d(x)$, appear in leading order of the $1/N_c$-expansion, while the flavor-singlet distributions, $\delta u(x) + \delta d(x)$ and $\delta\bar u(x) + \delta\bar d(x)$, are non-zero only in next-to-leading order. The transversity quark and antiquark distributions are found to be significantly different from the longitudinally polarized distributions $\Delta u (x) \pm \Delta d (x)$ and $\Delta\bar u (x) \pm \Delta\bar d (x)$, respectively, in contrast to the prediction of the naive non-relativistic quark model. We show that this affects the predictions for the spin asymmetries in Drell-Yan pair production in transversely polarized pp and ppbar collisions.Comment: 45 pages, 16 figure