Entanglement and symmetry in permutation symmetric states

We investigate the relationship between multipartite entanglement and symmetry, focusing on permutation symmetric states. We use the Majorana representation, where these states correspond to points on a sphere. Symmetry of the representation under rotation is equivalent to symmetry of the states under products of local unitaries. The geometric measure of entanglement is thus phrased entirely as a geometric optimisation, and a condition for the equivalence of entanglement measures written in terms of point symmetries. Finally we see that different symmetries of the states correspond to different types of entanglement with respect to SLOCC interconvertibility.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Preliminary versions of some of these results were presented in the QIT 16 workshop in Japan, D. Markham, Proceedings of QIT 16, Japan (2007). Updated to reflect changes for publication: expanded proofs and some new examples give

Thermal robustness of multipartite entanglement of the 1-D spin 1/2 XY model

We study the robustness of multipartite entanglement of the ground state of the one-dimensional spin 1/2 XY model with a transverse magnetic field in the presence of thermal excitations, by investigating a threshold temperature, below which the thermal state is guaranteed to be entangled. We obtain the threshold temperature based on the geometric measure of entanglement of the ground state. The threshold temperature reflects three characteristic lines in the phase diagram of the correlation function. Our approach reveals a region where multipartite entanglement at zero temperature is high but is thermally fragile, and another region where multipartite entanglement at zero temperature is low but is thermally robust.Comment: Revised, 11 pages, 7 figure

Worse Than Spam: Issues In Sampling Software Developers

Background: Reaching out to professional software developers is a crucial part of empirical software engineering research. One important method to investigate the state of practice is survey research. As drawing a random sample of professional software developers for a survey is rarely possible, researchers rely on various sampling strategies. Objective: In this paper, we report on our experience with different sampling strategies we employed, highlight ethical issues, and motivate the need to maintain a collection of key demographics about software developers to ease the assessment of the external validity of studies. Method: Our report is based on data from two studies we conducted in the past. Results: Contacting developers over public media proved to be the most effective and efficient sampling strategy. However, we not only describe the perspective of researchers who are interested in reaching goals like a large number of participants or a high response rate, but we also shed light onto ethical implications of different sampling strategies. We present one specific ethical guideline and point to debates in other research communities to start a discussion in the software engineering research community about which sampling strategies should be considered ethical.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the 2016 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2016), ACM, 201

Incorporating spatial correlations into multispecies mean-field models

In biology, we frequently observe different species existing within the same environment. For example, there are many cell types in a tumour, or different animal species may occupy a given habitat. In modeling interactions between such species, we often make use of the mean-field approximation, whereby spatial correlations between the locations of individuals are neglected. Whilst this approximation holds in certain situations, this is not always the case, and care must be taken to ensure the mean-field approximation is only used in appropriate settings. In circumstances where the mean-field approximation is unsuitable, we need to include information on the spatial distributions of individuals, which is not a simple task. In this paper, we provide a method that overcomes many of the failures of the mean-field approximation for an on-lattice volume-excluding birth-death-movement process with multiple species. We explicitly take into account spatial information on the distribution of individuals by including partial differential equation descriptions of lattice site occupancy correlations. We demonstrate how to derive these equations for the multispecies case and show results specific to a two-species problem. We compare averaged discrete results to both the mean-field approximation and our improved method, which incorporates spatial correlations. We note that the mean-field approximation fails dramatically in some cases, predicting very different behavior from that seen upon averaging multiple realizations of the discrete system. In contrast, our improved method provides excellent agreement with the averaged discrete behavior in all cases, thus providing a more reliable modeling framework. Furthermore, our method is tractable as the resulting partial differential equations can be solved efficiently using standard numerical techniques

New Protocols and Lower Bound for Quantum Secret Sharing with Graph States

We introduce a new family of quantum secret sharing protocols with limited quantum resources which extends the protocols proposed by Markham and Sanders and by Broadbent, Chouha, and Tapp. Parametrized by a graph G and a subset of its vertices A, the protocol consists in: (i) encoding the quantum secret into the corresponding graph state by acting on the qubits in A; (ii) use a classical encoding to ensure the existence of a threshold. These new protocols realize ((k,n)) quantum secret sharing i.e., any set of at least k players among n can reconstruct the quantum secret, whereas any set of less than k players has no information about the secret. In the particular case where the secret is encoded on all the qubits, we explore the values of k for which there exists a graph such that the corresponding protocol realizes a ((k,n)) secret sharing. We show that for any threshold k> n-n^{0.68} there exists a graph allowing a ((k,n)) protocol. On the other hand, we prove that for any k< 79n/156 there is no graph G allowing a ((k,n)) protocol. As a consequence there exists n_0 such that the protocols introduced by Markham and Sanders admit no threshold k when the secret is encoded on all the qubits and n>n_0

The geometric measure of entanglement for a symmetric pure state with positive amplitudes

In this paper for a class of symmetric multiparty pure states we consider a conjecture related to the geometric measure of entanglement: 'for a symmetric pure state, the closest product state in terms of the fidelity can be chosen as a symmetric product state'. We show that this conjecture is true for symmetric pure states whose amplitudes are all non-negative in a computational basis. The more general conjecture is still open.Comment: Similar results have been obtained independently and with different methods by T-C. Wei and S. Severini, see arXiv:0905.0012v

An investigation of TNAV equipped aircraft in a simulated en route metering environment

This document presents the results of an effort to estimate how often a TNAV (Time Navigation) equipped aircraft could be given a TNAV clearance in the En Route Metering (ERM) system as a function of the percentage of arriving traffic which is TNAV equipped. A fast-time simulation of Denver Stapleton international arrival traffic in the Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center route structure, including en route metering operations, was used to develop data on estimated conflicts, clearance communications and fuel usage for traffic mixes of 25, 50, 75 and 100% TNAV equipped. This study supports an overall effort by NASA to assess the benefits and required technology for using TNAV-equipped aircraft in the ERM environment

Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager On-Orbit Radiometric Calibration

The Operational Land Imager (OLI), the VIS/NIR/SWIR sensor on the Landsat-8 has been successfully acquiring Earth Imagery for more than four years. The OLI incorporates two on-board radiometric calibration systems, one diffuser based and one lamp based, each with multiple sources. For each system one source is treated as primary and used frequently and the other source(s) are used less frequently to assist in tracking any degradation in the primary sources. In addition, via a spacecraft maneuver, the OLI instrument views the moon once a lunar cycle (approx. 29 days). The integrated lunar irradiances from these acquisitions are compared to the output of a lunar irradiance model. The results from all these techniques, combined with cross calibrations with other sensors and ground based vicarious measurements are used to monitor the OLI's stability and correct for any changes observed. To date, the various techniques have other detected significant changes in the shortest wavelength OLI band centered at 443 nm and these are currently being adjusted in the operational processing