2,741 research outputs found

    "Be war, ye wemen, of youre subtyle fo" : a study of Chaucer's Legend of good women : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University

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    The principal aim of this thesis is to survey the two main critical opinions which have been expressed upon the Legend of Good Women, and to ascertain the merits of each case in conjunction with an attempt at bringing about some reconciliation of the two. The thesis begins by pointing out the relatively cursory critical attention that the Legend has in fact received. The Prologue alone has appealed to critics generally because of its two versions, Chaucer's use of courtly love conventions, and because Queen Anne may have commanded him to write it. The weight of critical opinion maintains that the legends them-selves are generally monotonous and tedious, and that Chaucer himself was bored. A survey is made of the development and entrenchment of this, the bored thesis. A rare and recent case against this thesis is then examined in detail. As this essentially rests on the recognition and assessment of the rhetorical technique abbreviatio, a brief survey of medieval rhetorical theory is then made. This is followed by an attempt to set the work in its wider medieval context as a counter to prejudice against the Legend due to a modern perspective. It is possible then to endeavour to look at the poem from Chaucer's viewpoint.It is concluded that the poem was essentially an experiment for him. Also, the smallness of scale and repetitious theme of the legends must have bothered Chaucer as much as they do modern critics. This comes out in the ambivalent position of the narrator and it is here that a possible reconciliation of the opposing theses is suggested. Finally, Chaucer neglected the rather flat Legend for the infinitely more varied and human Canterbury Tales

    Quantum Limits of Thermometry

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    The precision of typical thermometers consisting of NN particles is shot noise limited, improving as ∼1/N\sim1/\sqrt{N}. For high precision thermometry and thermometric standards this presents an important theoretical noise floor. Here it is demonstrated that thermometry may be mapped onto the problem of phase estimation, and using techniques from optimal phase estimation, it follows that the scaling of the precision of a thermometer may in principle be improved to ∼1/N\sim1/N, representing a Heisenberg limit to thermometry.Comment: 4 page

    Dephasing-assisted Gain and Loss in Mesoscopic Quantum Systems

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    Motivated by recent experiments, we analyse the phonon-assisted steady-state gain of a microwave field driving a double quantum-dot in a resonator. We apply the results of our companion paper, which derives the complete set of fourth-order Lindblad dissipators using Keldysh methods, to show that resonator gain and loss are substantially affected by dephasing-assisted dissipative processes in the quantum-dot system. These additional processes, which go beyond recently proposed polaronic theories, are in good quantitative agreement with experimental observationsComment: 5 pages, 3 Figures, published together with arXiv:1608.0416

    Fault tolerant quantum computation with very high threshold for loss errors

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    Many proposals for fault tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) suffer detectable loss processes. Here we show that topological FTQC schemes, which are known to have high error thresholds, are also extremely robust against losses. We demonstrate that these schemes tolerate loss rates up to 24.9%, determined by bond percolation on a cubic lattice. Our numerical results show that these schemes retain good performance when loss and computational errors are simultaneously present.Comment: 4 pages, comments still very welcome. v2 is a reasonable approximation to the published versio

    Decoding Schemes for Foliated Sparse Quantum Error Correcting Codes

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    Foliated quantum codes are a resource for fault-tolerant measurement-based quantum error correction for quantum repeaters and for quantum computation. They represent a general approach to integrating a range of possible quantum error correcting codes into larger fault-tolerant networks. Here we present an efficient heuristic decoding scheme for foliated quantum codes, based on message passing between primal and dual code 'sheets'. We test this decoder on two different families of sparse quantum error correcting code: turbo codes and bicycle codes, and show reasonably high numerical performance thresholds. We also present a construction schedule for building such code states.Comment: 23 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

    Detecting itinerant single microwave photons

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    Single photon detectors are fundamental tools of investigation in quantum optics and play a central role in measurement theory and quantum informatics. Photodetectors based on different technologies exist at optical frequencies and much effort is currently being spent on pushing their efficiencies to meet the demands coming from the quantum computing and quantum communication proposals. In the microwave regime however, a single photon detector has remained elusive although several theoretical proposals have been put forth. In this article, we review these recent proposals, especially focusing on non-destructive detectors of propagating microwave photons. These detection schemes using superconducting artificial atoms can reach detection efficiencies of 90\% with existing technologies and are ripe for experimental investigations.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

    Photon Frequency Mode Matching using Acousto-Optic Frequency Beam Splitters

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    It is a difficult engineering task to create distinct solid state single photon sources which nonetheless emit photons at the same frequency. It is also hard to create entangled photon pairs from quantum dots. In the spirit of quantum engineering we propose a simple optical circuit which can, in the right circumstances, make frequency distinguishable photons frequency indistinguishable. Our circuit can supply a downstream solution to both problems, opening up a large window of allowed frequency mismatches between physical mechanisms. The only components used are spectrum analysers/prisms and an Acousto-Optic Modulator. We also note that an Acousto-Optic Modulator can be used to obtain Hong-Ou-Mandel two photon interference effects from the frequency distinguishable photons generated by distinct sources.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
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