The role of local and global strangeness neutrality at the inhomogeneous freeze-out in relativistic heavy ion collisions

The decoupling surface in relativistic heavy-ion collisions may not be homogeneous. Rather, inhomogeneities should form when a rapid transition from high to low entropy density occurs. We analyze the hadron "chemistry" from high-energy heavy-ion reactions for the presence of such density inhomogeneities. We show that due to the non-linear dependence of the particle densities on the temperature and baryon-chemical potential such inhomogeneities should be visible even in the integrated, inclusive abundances. We analyze experimental data from Pb+Pb collisions at CERN-SPS and Au+Au collisions at BNL-RHIC to determine the amplitude of inhomogeneities and the role of local and global strangeness neutrality.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, To appear in proceedings of the workshop on 'Particle Correlations and Femtoscopy' September 9-11, 2006, Sao Paulo, Brazi

Coined Quantum Walks as Quantum Markov Chains

We analyze the equivalence between discrete-time coined quantum walks and Szegedy's quantum walks. We characterize a class of flip-flop coined models with generalized Grover coin on a graph $\Gamma$ that can be directly converted into Szegedy's model on the subdivision graph of $\Gamma$ and we describe a method to convert one model into the other. This method improves previous results in literature that need to use the staggered model and the concept of line graph, which are avoided here.Comment: 10 pages, 4 fig