arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to M. Rossi.
We introduce a quantum cellular automaton that achieves approximate phase-covariant cloning of qubits. The automaton is optimized for 1-to-2N economical cloning. The use of the automaton for cloning allows us to exploit different foliations for improving the performance with given resources.
We calculate the amount of entanglement of the multiqubit quantum states employed in the Grover algorithm, by following its dynamics at each step of the computation. We show that genuine multipartite entanglement is always present. Remarkably, the dynamics of any type of entanglement as well as of genuine multipartite entanglement is independent of the number n of qubits for large n, thus exhibiting a scale invariance property. We compare this result with the entanglement dynamics induced by a fixed-point quantum search algorithm. We also investigate criteria for efficient simulatability in the context of Grover's algorithm.
Defects are believed to play a fundamental role in the supersolid state of 4He. We report on studies by exact Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations at zero temperature of the properties of solid 4He in presence of many vacancies, up to 30 in two dimensions (2D). In all studied cases the crystalline order is stable at least as long as the concentration of vacancies is below 2.5%. In the 2D system for a small number, n_v, of vacancies such defects can be identified in the crystalline lattice and are strongly correlated with an attractive interaction. On the contrary when n_v~10 vacancies in the relaxed system disappear and in their place one finds dislocations and a revival of the Bose-Einstein condensation. Thus, should zero-point motion defects be present in solid 4He, such defects would be dislocations and not vacancies, at least in 2D. In order to avoid using periodic boundary conditions we have studied the exact ground state of solid 4He confined in a circular region by an external potential. We find that defects tend to be localized in an interfacial region of width of about 15 A. Our computation allows to put as upper bound limit to zero--point defects the concentration 0.003 in the 2D system close to melting density.
Diagonal and off-diagonal properties of 2D solid 4He systems doped with a quantized vortex have been investigated via the Shadow Path Integral Ground State method using the fixed-phase approach. The chosen approximate phase induces the standard Onsager-Feynman flow field. In this approximation the vortex acts as a static external potential and the resulting Hamiltonian can be treated exactly with Quantum Monte Carlo methods. The vortex core is found to sit in an interstitial site and a very weak relaxation of the lattice positions away from the vortex core position has been observed. Also other properties like Bragg peaks in the static structure factor or the behavior of vacancies are very little affected by the presence of the vortex. We have computed also the one-body density matrix in perfect and defected 4He crystals finding that the vortex has no sensible effect on the off-diagonal long range tail of the density matrix. Within the assumed Onsager Feynman phase, we find that a quantized vortex cannot auto-sustain itself unless a condensate is already present like when dislocations are present. It remains to be investigated if backflow can change this conclusion.
Utility (e.g., sum-rate) maximization for multiantenna broadcast and interference channels (with one antenna at the receivers) is known to be in general a non-convex problem, if one limits the scope to linear (beamforming) strategies at transmitter and receivers. In this paper, it is shown that, under some standard assumptions, most notably that the utility function is decreasing with the interference levels at the receivers, a global optimal solution can be found with reduced complexity via a suitably designed Branch-and-Bound method. Although infeasible for real-time implementation, this procedure enables a non-heuristic and systematic assessment of suboptimal techniques. A suboptimal strategy is then proposed that, when applied to sum-rate maximization, reduces to the well-known distributed pricing techniques. Finally, numerical results are provided that compare global optimal solutions with suboptimal (pricing) techniques for sum-rate maximization problems, leading to insight into issues such as the robustness against bad initializations.
We have extracted information about real time dynamics of 4He systems from noisy imaginary time correlation functions f(tau) computed via Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC): production and falsification of model spectral functions s(omega) are obtained via a survival-to-compatibility with f(tau) evolutionary process, based on Genetic Algorithms. Statistical uncertainty in f(tau) is promoted to be an asset via a sampling of equivalent f(tau) within the noise, which give rise to independent evolutionary processes. In the case of pure superfluid 4He we have recovered from exact QMC simulations sharp quasi-particle excitations with spectral functions displaying also the multiphonon branch. As further applications, we have studied the impuriton branch of one 3He atom in liquid 4He and the vacancy-wave excitations in hcp solid 4He finding a novel roton like feature.
The polyalanine-based peptide series Ac-Ala_n-LysH+ (n=5-20) is a prime example that a secondary structure motif which is well-known from the solution phase (here: helices) can be formed in vacuo. We here revisit this conclusion for n=5,10,15, using density-functional theory (van der Waals corrected generalized gradient approximation), and gas-phase infrared vibrational spectroscopy. For the longer molecules (n=10,15) α-helical models provide good qualitative agreement (theory vs. experiment) already in the harmonic approximation. For n=5, the lowest energy conformer is not a simple helix, but competes closely with α-helical motifs at 300K. Close agreement between infrared spectra from experiment and ab initio molecular dynamics (including anharmonic effects) supports our findings.
Defects are believed to play a fundamental role in the supersolid state of 4He. We have studied solid 4He in two dimensions (2D) as function of the number of vacancies n_v, up to 30, inserted in the initial configuration at rho = 0.0765 A^-2, close to the melting density, with the exact zero temperature Shadow Path Integral Ground State method. The crystalline order is found to be stable also in presence of many vacancies and we observe two completely different regimes. For small n_v, up to about 6, vacancies form a bound state and cause a decrease of the crystalline order. At larger n_v, the formation energy of an extra vacancy at fixed density decreases by one order of magnitude to about 0.6 K. In the equilibrated state it is no more possible to recognize vacancies because they mainly transform into quantum dislocations and crystalline order is found almost independent on how many vacancies have been inserted in the initial configuration. The one--body density matrix in this latter regime shows a non decaying large distance tail: dislocations, that in 2D are point defects, turn out to be mobile, their number is fluctuating, and they are able to induce exchanges of particles across the system mainly triggered by the dislocation cores. These results indicate that the notion of incommensurate versus commensurate state loses meaning for solid 4He in 2D, because the number of lattice sites becomes ill defined when the system is not commensurate. Crystalline order is found to be stable also in 3D in presence of up to 100 vacancies.
The convective instability in a plane liquid layer with time-dependent temperature profile is investigated by means of a general method suitable for linear stability analysis of an unsteady basic flow. The method is based on a non-normal approach, and predicts the onset of instability, critical wave number and time. The method is applied to transient Rayleigh-Benard-Marangoni convection due to cooling by evaporation. Numerical results as well as theoretical scalings for the critical parameters as function of the Biot number are presented for the limiting cases of purely buoyancy-driven and purely surface-tension-driven convection. Critical parameters from calculations are in good agreement with those from experiments on drying polymer solutions, where the surface cooling is induced by solvent evaporation.
Generally ``exact'' Quantum Monte Carlo computations for the ground state of many Bosons make use of importance sampling. The importance sampling is based, either on a guiding function or on an initial variational wave function. Here we investigate the need of importance sampling in the case of Path Integral Ground State (PIGS) Monte Carlo. PIGS is based on a discrete imaginary time evolution of an initial wave function with a non zero overlap with the ground state, that gives rise to a discrete path which is sampled via a Metropolis like algorithm. In principle the exact ground state is reached in the limit of an infinite imaginary time evolution, but actual computations are based on finite time evolutions and the question is whether such computations give unbiased exact results. We have studied bulk liquid and solid 4He with PIGS by considering as initial wave function a constant, i.e. the ground state of an ideal Bose gas. This implies that the evolution toward the ground state is driven only by the imaginary time propagator, i.e. there is no importance sampling. For both the phases we obtain results converging to those obtained by considering the best available variational wave function (the Shadow wave function) as initial wave function. Moreover we obtain the same results even by considering wave functions with the wrong correlations, for instance a wave function of a strongly localized Einstein crystal for the liquid phase. This convergence is true not only for diagonal properties such as the energy, the radial distribution function and the static structure factor, but also for off-diagonal ones, such as the one--body density matrix. From this analysis we conclude that zero temperature PIGS calculations can be as unbiased as those of finite temperature Path Integral Monte Carlo.
A Jastrow wave function (JWF) and a shadow wave function (SWF) describe a quantum solid with Bose--Einstein condensate; i.e. a supersolid. It is known that both JWF and SWF describe a quantum solid with also a finite equilibrium concentration of vacancies x_v. We outline a route for estimating x_v by exploiting the existing formal equivalence between the absolute square of the ground state wave function and the Boltzmann weight of a classical solid. We compute x_v for the quantum solids described by JWF and SWF employing very accurate numerical techniques. For JWF we find a very small value for the zero point vacancy concentration, x_v=(1.4\pm0.1) x 10^-6. For SWF, which presently gives the best variational description of solid 4He, we find the significantly larger value x_v=(1.4\pm0.1) x 10^-3 at a density close to melting. We also study two and three vacancies. We find that there is a strong short range attraction but the vacancies do not form a bound state.
We are investigating the properties of vacancies in solid 4He with the exact zero temperature SPIGS method. Our aim is to study the possibility of phase--separation between vacancies and the perfect crystal. We find a significant correlation among vacancies both in two and in three dimensional solid 4He. In 3D we have considered up to 5 vacancies in a hcp crystal at a density rho = 0.0293 AA^-3, close to the melting, and in 2D we have considered up to 6 vacancies in a triangular crystal at rho = 0.0765 AA^-2. In all the considered cases the correlation among vacancies seems to display an exponential decay that would suggest the presence of a bound state. The systematically sublinear dependence on the number of vacancies found for the activation energy strengthens the indication of an attractive interaction, even if we have direct evidence that vacancies do not form a single compact cluster.
This paper describes JANUS, a modular massively parallel and reconfigurable FPGA-based computing system. Each JANUS module has a computational core and a host. The computational core is a 4x4 array of FPGA-based processing elements with nearest-neighbor data links. Processors are also directly connected to an I/O node attached to the JANUS host, a conventional PC. JANUS is tailored for, but not limited to, the requirements of a class of hard scientific applications characterized by regular code structure, unconventional data manipulation instructions and not too large data-base size. We discuss the architecture of this configurable machine, and focus on its use on Monte Carlo simulations of statistical mechanics. On this class of application JANUS achieves impressive performances: in some cases one JANUS processing element outperfoms high-end PCs by a factor ~ 1000. We also discuss the role of JANUS on other classes of scientific applications.
We have studied a two-dimensional triangular commensurate crystal of 4He with the exact T=0 K Path Integral Ground State (PIGS) Monte Carlo method. We have projected onto the true ground state both a Jastrow-Nosanow wave function, in which equilibrium positions are explicitly given and no Bose-Einstein (BEC) is present, and a translationally invariant shadow wave function, in which the solid phase emerges through a spontaneously broken symmetry process and it has BEC. We find a remarkable convergence to the same properties, both the diagonal ones as well as the off-diagonal one-body density matrix rho_1. This supplies a strong evidence that no variational bias are present in the PIGS method. We find no BEC in the commensurate 2D 4He crystal at T=0 K, rho_1 shows an exponential decay in the large distance range. The structure found in rho_1 is due to virtual vacancy--interstitial pairs and this shows up in the momentum distribution.
We have investigated the ground state properties of solid $^4$He with the Shadow Path Integral Ground State method. This exact T=0 K projector method allows to describes quantum solids without introducing any a priori equilibrium position. We have found that the efficiency in computing off-diagonal properties in the solid phase sensibly improves when the direct sampling of permutations, in principle not required, is introduced. We have computed the exact one-body density matrix (obdm) in large commensurate 4He crystal finding a decreasing condensate fraction with increasing imaginary time of projection, making our result not conclusive on the presence of Bose-Einstein condensation in bulk solid 4He. We can only give an upper bound of 2.5 times 10^-8 on the condensate fraction. We have exploited the SPIGS method to study also 4He crystal containing grain boundaries by computing the related surface energy and the obdm along these defects. We have found that also highly symmetrical grain boundaries have a finite condensate fraction. We have also derived a route for the estimation of the true equilibrium concentration of vacancies x_v in bulk T=0 K solid 4He, which is shown to be finite, x_v=0.0014(1) at the melting density, when computed with the variational shadow wave function technique.
We have computed the one--body density matrix rho_1 in solid 4He at T=0 K using the Shadow Wave Function (SWF) variational technique. The accuracy of the SWF has been tested with an exact projector method. We find that off-diagonal long range order is present in rho_1 for a perfect hcp and bcc solid 4He for a range of densities above the melting one, at least up to 54 bars. This is the first microscopic indication that Bose Einstein Condensation (BEC) is present in perfect solid 4He. At melting the condensate fraction in the hcp solid is 5*10^{-6} and it decreases by increasing the density. The key process giving rise to BEC is the formation of vacancy--interstitial pairs. We also present values for Leggett's upper bound on the superfluid fraction deduced from the exact local density.
We construct universal twists connecting the centrally extended double Yangian DY(sl(2))_c with deformed double Yangians DY_r(sl(2))_c, thereby establishing the quasi-Hopf structures of the latter.
A self-contained description of algebraic structures, obtained by combinations of various limit procedures applied to vertex and face sl(2) elliptic quantum affine algebras, is given. New double Yangians structures of dynamical type are in particular defined. Connections between these structures are established. A number of them take the form of twist-like actions. These are conjectured to be evaluations of universal twists.