Beamed Core Antimatter Propulsion: Engine Design and Optimization

A conceptual design for beamed core antimatter propulsion is reported, where electrically charged annihilation products directly generate thrust after being deflected and collimated by a magnetic nozzle. Simulations were carried out using the Geant4 (Geometry and tracking) software toolkit released by the CERN accelerator laboratory for Monte Carlo simulation of the interaction of particles with matter and fields. Geant permits a more sophisticated and comprehensive design and optimization of antimatter engines than the software environment for simulations reported by prior researchers. The main finding is that effective exhaust speeds Ve ~ 0.69c (where c is the speed of light) are feasible for charged pions in beamed core propulsion, a major improvement over the Ve ~ 0.33c estimate based on prior simulations. The improvement resulted from optimization of the geometry and the field configuration of the magnetic nozzle. Moreover, this improved performance is realized using a magnetic field on the order of 10 T at the location of its highest magnitude. Such a field could be produced with today's technology, whereas prior nozzle designs anticipated and required major advances in this area. The paper also briefly reviews prospects for production of the fuel needed for a beamed core engine.Comment: To be published in J. of British Interplanetary Society; this post-referee version has updated references and Fig. 4 is changed for better reproduction in b/

Non-equilibrium theory of charge qubit decoherence in the quantum point contact measurement

A non-equilibrium theory describing the charge qubit dynamics measured by a quantum point contact is developed based on Schwinger-Keldysh's approach. Using the real-time diagram technique, we derive the master equation to all orders in perturbation expansions. The non-Markovian processes in the qubit dynamics is naturally taken into account. The qubit decoherence, in particular, the influence of the tunneling-electron fluctuation in the quantum point contact with a longer time correlation, is studied in the framework. We consider the Lorentzian-type spectral density to characterize the channel mixture of the electron tunneling processes induced by the measurement and determine the correlation time scale of the tunneling-electron fluctuation. The result shows that as the quantum point contact is casted with a narrower profile of the spectral density, tunneling electrons can propagate with a longer time correlation and lead to the non-Markovian processes of the qubit dynamics. The qubit electron in the charge qubit will be driven coherently. The quantum point contact measurement with the minimum deviation of the electron tunneling processes prevents the qubit state from the decoherence.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

HIBERT: Document Level Pre-training of Hierarchical Bidirectional Transformers for Document Summarization

Neural extractive summarization models usually employ a hierarchical encoder for document encoding and they are trained using sentence-level labels, which are created heuristically using rule-based methods. Training the hierarchical encoder with these \emph{inaccurate} labels is challenging. Inspired by the recent work on pre-training transformer sentence encoders \cite{devlin:2018:arxiv}, we propose {\sc Hibert} (as shorthand for {\bf HI}erachical {\bf B}idirectional {\bf E}ncoder {\bf R}epresentations from {\bf T}ransformers) for document encoding and a method to pre-train it using unlabeled data. We apply the pre-trained {\sc Hibert} to our summarization model and it outperforms its randomly initialized counterpart by 1.25 ROUGE on the CNN/Dailymail dataset and by 2.0 ROUGE on a version of New York Times dataset. We also achieve the state-of-the-art performance on these two datasets.Comment: to appear in ACL 201

Supersolid with nontrivial topological spin textures in spin-orbit-coupled Bose gases

Supersolid is a long-sought exotic phase of matter, which is characterized by the coexistence of a diagonal long-range order of solid and an off-diagonal long-range order of superfluid. Possible candidates to realize such a phase have been previously considered, including hard-core bosons with long-range interaction and soft-core bosons. Here we demonstrate that an ultracold atomic condensate of hard-core bosons with contact interaction can establish a supersolid phase when simultaneously subjected to spin-orbit coupling and a spin-dependent periodic potential. This supersolid phase is accompanied by topologically nontrivial spin textures, and is signaled by the separation of momentum distribution peaks, which can be detected via time-of-flight measurements. We also discuss possibilities to produce and observe the supersolid phase for realistic experimental situations

Manipulating quantum information on the controllable systems or subspaces

In this paper, we explore how to constructively manipulate qubits by rotating Bloch spheres. It is revealed that three-rotation and one-rotation Hamiltonian controls can be constructed to steer qubits when two tunable Hamiltonian controls are available. It is demonstrated in this research that local-wave function controls such as Bang-Bang, triangle-function and quadratic function controls can be utilized to manipulate quantum states on the Bloch sphere. A new kind of time-energy performance index is proposed to trade-off time and energy resource cost, in which control magnitudes are optimized in terms of this kind of performance. It is further exemplified that this idea can be generalized to manipulate encoded qubits on the controllable subspace

Spin-orbit Coupled Bose-Einstein Condensates in Spin-dependent Optical Lattices

We investigate the ground-state properties of spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates in spin-dependent optical lattices. The competition between the spin-orbit coupling strength and the depth of the optical lattice leads to a rich phase diagram. Without spin-orbit coupling, the spin-dependent optical lattices separate the condensates into alternating spin domains with opposite magnetization directions. With relatively weak spin-orbit coupling, the spin domain wall is dramatically changed from N\'{e}el wall to Bloch wall. For sufficiently strong spin-orbit coupling, vortex chains and antivortex chains are excited in the spin-up and spin-down domains respectively, corresponding to the formation of a lattice composed of meron-pairs and antimeron-pairs in the pseudospin representation. We also discuss how to observe these phenomena in real experiments

A new scheme for probabilistic teleportation and its potential applications

We propose a novel scheme for probabilistic teleportation when the information of the partially entangled state is only available for the sender. This is in contrast with the fact that the receiver must know the non-maximally entangled state in previous typical schemes for the teleportation. Additionally, we illustrate two potential applications of the novel scheme to probabilistically teleport an unknown two-level quantum state from a sender to a receiver with the help of an assistant, who plays distinguishable roles under different communication conditions, and the applications indicate that our proposal could improve the security and enlarge the applied range of probabilistic teleportation.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

Transport Model Studies of the Baryon-Rich Quark-Gluon Plasma formed in Heavy Ion Collisions

Heavy ion collisions in the low energy run at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Germany are expected to produce a quark-gluon plasma that has a finite baryon chemical potential, allowing thus the possibility to study the location of the critical endpoint in the QCD phase diagram. In this talk, using a multiphase transport model, that includes interactions in both initial partonic and final hadronic matters and the transition between these two phases of matter, we discuss the effects of partonic interactions on observables such as the elliptic flow that have played essential roles in studying the properties of the net baryon free quark-gluon plasma produced in heavy ion collisions at higher energies at RHIC. Also, we study the effect of density fluctuations due to a first-order transition between the quark-gluon plasma and hadronic matter on fluctuations of hadron mean transverse momentum and produced deuteron number as well as on two-pion correlations. We further discuss the possibility of studying the mechanism of charm energy loss in the baryon-rich quark-gluon plasma and the properties of phi mesons in hot-dense matter produced in these collisions.Comment: 15 pages, 7 pages. Contribution to the 5th International Workshop on Critical Point and Onset of Deconfinement, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York, USA, June 8-12, 200

The magnetization degree of the outflow powering the highly-polarized reverse shock emission of GRB 120308A

GRB 120308A, a long duration $\gamma-$ray burst detected by {\it Swift}, was distinguished by a highly-polarized early optical afterglow emission that strongly suggests an ordered magnetic field component in the emitting region. In this work we model the optical and X-ray emission in the reverse and forward shock scenario and show that the strength of the magnetic field in reverse shock region is $\sim 10$ times stronger than that in the forward shock region. Consequently the outflow powering the highly-polarized reverse shock optical emission was mildly-magnetized at a degree $\sigma \sim$ a few percent. Considering the plausible magnetic energy dissipation in both the acceleration and prompt emission phases of the Gamma-ray Burst (GRB) outflow, the afterglow data of GRB 120308A provides us the compelling evidence that at least for some GRBs a non-ignorable fraction of the energy was released in the form of Poynting-flux, confirming the finding firstly made in the reverse-forward shock emission modeling of the optical afterglow of GRB 990123 (Fan et al. 2002; Zhang et al. 2003)

Fermi/LAT observations of Lobe-dominant Radio Galaxy 3C 207 and Possible Radiation Region of the Gamma-Rays

3C 207 is a lobe-dominant radio galaxy with one sided jet and the bright knots in kpc-Mpc scale were resolved in the radio, optical and X-ray bands. It was confirmed as a gamma-ray emitter with Fermi/LAT, but it is uncertain whether the gamma-ray emission region is the core or knots due to the low spatial resolution of Fermi/LAT. We present an analysis of its Fermi/LAT data in the past 9 years. Different from the radio and optical emission from the core, it is found that the gamma-ray emission is steady without detection of flux variation over 2 sigma confidence level. This likely implies that the gamma-ray emission is from its knots. We collect the radio, optical, and X-ray data of knot-A, the closest knot from the core at 1 arcsec, and compile its spectral energy distribution (SED). Although the single-zone synchrotron+SSC+IC/CMB model by assuming knot-A at rest can reproduce the SED in the radio-optical-X-ray band, the predicted gamma-ray flux is lower than the LAT observations and the derived magnetic field strength deviates the equipartition condition with 3 orders of magnitude. Assuming that knot-A is relativistically moving, its SED from radio to gamma-ray bands would be well represented with the single-zone synchrotron+SSC+IC/CMB model under the equipartition condition. These results likely suggest that the gamma-ray emission may be from knot-A via the IC/CMB process and the knot should have relativistical motion. The jet power derived from our model parameters is also roughly consistent with the kinetic power estimated with the radio data.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in RA