L'homme et l'animal dans le bassin du lac Tchad

Dans le sud du bassin tchadien, la culture du sorgho repiqué - masakwa au Nigeria, muskwari au Nord-Cameroun, berbéré au Tchad - a pris une grande importance dans les systèmes de production et les paysages. L'exemple de trois terroirs montre que son extension s'est accélérée avec l'aggravation des conditions climatiques et l'introduction du coton. La culture de ce sorgho a progressivement sollicité les terres dégagées rapidement par la crue, traditionnellement vouées aux pâturages de saison sèche : la mise en culture de ces terres de décrue paraît une évolution inéluctable. Les éleveurs transhumants sont les grands perdants de cette évolution. Impuissants devant l'augmentation de l'espace cultivé, tant sur les terres exondées que celles inondables, ils semblent contraints de se sédentariser. (Résumé d'auteur

The quantum Rabi model in a superfluid Bose-Einstein condensate

We propose a quantum simulation of the quantum Rabi model in an atomic quantum dot, which is a single atom in a tight optical trap coupled to the quasiparticle modes of a superfluid Bose-Einstein condensate. This widely tunable setup allows to simulate the ultrastrong coupling regime of light-matter interaction in a system which enjoys an amenable characteristic timescale, paving the way for an experimental analysis of the transition between the Jaynes-Cummings and the quantum Rabi dynamics using cold-atom systems. Our scheme can be naturally extended to simulate multi-qubit quantum Rabi models. In particular, we discuss the appearance of effective two-qubit interactions due to phononic exchange, among other features.Comment: Improved version and references adde

Extracting Semantics of Individual Places from Movement Data by Analyzing Temporal Patterns of Visits

Data reflecting movements of people, such as GPS or GSM tracks, can be a source of information about mobility behaviors and activities of people. Such information is required for various kinds of spatial planning in the public and business sectors. Movement data by themselves are semantically poor. Meaningful information can be derived by means of interactive visual analysis performed by a human expert; however, this is only possible for data about a small number of people. We suggest an approach that allows scaling to large datasets reflecting movements of numerous people. It includes extracting stops, clustering them for identifying personal places of interest (POIs), and creating temporal signatures of the POIs characterizing the temporal distribution of the stops with respect to the daily and weekly time cycles and the time line. The analyst can give meanings to selected POIs based on their temporal signatures (i.e., classify them as home, work, etc.), and then POIs with similar signatures can be classified automatically. We demonstrate the possibilities for interactive visual semantic analysis by example of GSM, GPS, and Twitter data. GPS data allow inferring richer semantic information, but temporal signatures alone may be insufficient for interpreting short stops. Twitter data are similar to GSM data but additionally contain message texts, which can help in place interpretation. We plan to develop an intelligent system that learns how to classify personal places and trips while a human analyst visually analyzes and semantically annotates selected subsets of movement data

Parametric coupling for superconducting qubits

We propose a scheme to couple two superconducting charge or flux qubits biased at their symmetry points with unequal energy splittings. Modulating the coupling constant between two qubits at the sum or difference of their two frequencies allows to bring them into resonance in the rotating frame. Switching on and off the modulation amounts to switching on and off the coupling which can be realized at nanosecond speed. We discuss various physical implementations of this idea, and find that our scheme can lead to rapid operation of a two-qubit gate.Comment: 6 page

Process tomography of field damping and measurement of Fock state lifetimes by quantum non-demolition photon counting in a cavity

The relaxation of a quantum field stored in a high-$Q$ superconducting cavity is monitored by non-resonant Rydberg atoms. The field, subjected to repetitive quantum non-demolition (QND) photon counting, undergoes jumps between photon number states. We select ensembles of field realizations evolving from a given Fock state and reconstruct the subsequent evolution of their photon number distributions. We realize in this way a tomography of the photon number relaxation process yielding all the jump rates between Fock states. The damping rates of the $n$ photon states ($0\leq n \leq 7$) are found to increase linearly with $n$. The results are in excellent agreement with theory including a small thermal contribution

Realization of a superconducting atom chip

We have trapped rubidium atoms in the magnetic field produced by a superconducting atom chip operated at liquid Helium temperatures. Up to $8.2\cdot 10^5$ atoms are held in a Ioffe-Pritchard trap at a distance of 440 $\mu$m from the chip surface, with a temperature of 40 $\mu$K. The trap lifetime reaches 115 s at low atomic densities. These results open the way to the exploration of atom--surface interactions and coherent atomic transport in a superconducting environment, whose properties are radically different from normal metals at room temperature.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Phase space tweezers for tailoring cavity fields by quantum Zeno dynamics

We discuss an implementation of Quantum Zeno Dynamics in a Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics experiment. By performing repeated unitary operations on atoms coupled to the field, we restrict the field evolution in chosen subspaces of the total Hilbert space. This procedure leads to promising methods for tailoring non-classical states. We propose to realize `tweezers' picking a coherent field at a point in phase space and moving it towards an arbitrary final position without affecting other non-overlapping coherent components. These effects could be observed with a state-of-the-art apparatus

Microwave probes Dipole Blockade and van der Waals Forces in a Cold Rydberg Gas

We show that microwave spectroscopy of a dense Rydberg gas trapped on a superconducting atom chip in the dipole blockade regime reveals directly the dipole-dipole many-body interaction energy spectrum. We use this method to investigate the expansion of the Rydberg cloud under the effect of repulsive van der Waals forces and the breakdown of the frozen gas approximation. This study opens a promising route for quantum simulation of many-body systems and quantum information transport in chains of strongly interacting Rydberg atoms.Comment: PACS: 03.67.-a, 32.80.Ee, 32.30.-