Direct frequency comb laser cooling and trapping

Continuous wave (CW) lasers are the enabling technology for producing ultracold atoms and molecules through laser cooling and trapping. The resulting pristine samples of slow moving particles are the de facto starting point for both fundamental and applied science when a highly-controlled quantum system is required. Laser cooled atoms have recently led to major advances in quantum information, the search to understand dark energy, quantum chemistry, and quantum sensors. However, CW laser technology currently limits laser cooling and trapping to special types of elements that do not include highly abundant and chemically relevant atoms such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Here, we demonstrate that Doppler cooling and trapping by optical frequency combs may provide a route to trapped, ultracold atoms whose spectra are not amenable to CW lasers. We laser cool a gas of atoms by driving a two-photon transition with an optical frequency comb, an efficient process to which every comb tooth coherently contributes. We extend this technique to create a magneto-optical trap (MOT), an electromagnetic beaker for accumulating the laser-cooled atoms for further study. Our results suggest that the efficient frequency conversion offered by optical frequency combs could provide a key ingredient for producing trapped, ultracold samples of nature's most abundant building blocks, as well as antihydrogen. As such, the techniques demonstrated here may enable advances in fields as disparate as molecular biology and the search for physics beyond the standard model.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Linking Stochastic Dynamics to Population Distribution: An Analytical Framework of Gene Expression

We present an analytical framework describing the steady-state distribution of protein concentration in live cells, considering that protein production occurs in random bursts with an exponentially distributed number of molecules. We extend this framework for cases of transcription autoregulation and noise propagation in a simple genetic network. This model allows for the extraction of kinetic parameters of gene expression from steady-state distributions of protein concentration in a cell population, which are available from single cell data obtained by flow cytometry or fluorescence microscopy

Practical Certificateless Aggregate Signatures From Bilinear Maps

Aggregate signature is a digital signature with a striking property that anyone can aggregate n individual signatures on n different messages which are signed by n distinct signers, into a single compact signature to reduce computational and storage costs. In this work, two practical certificateless aggregate signature schemes are proposed from bilinear maps. The first scheme CAS-1 reduces the costs of communication and signer-side computation but trades off the storage, while CAS-2 minimizes the storage but sacrifices the communication costs. One can choose either of the schemes by consideration of the application requirement. Compare with ID-based schemes, our schemes do not entail public key certificates as well and achieve the trust level 3, which imply the frauds of the authority are detectable. Both of the schemes are proven secure in the random oracle model by assuming the intractability of the computational Diffie-Hellman problem over the groups with bilinear maps, where the forking lemma technique is avoided

Anomalous scaling of conductivity in integrable fermion systems

We analyze the high-temperature conductivity in one-dimensional integrable models of interacting fermions: the t-V model (anisotropic Heisenberg spin chain) and the Hubbard model, at half-filling in the regime corresponding to insulating ground state. A microcanonical Lanczos method study for finite size systems reveals anomalously large finite-size effects at low frequencies while a frequency-moment analysis indicates a finite d.c. conductivity. This phenomenon also appears in a prototype integrable quantum system of impenetrable particles, representing a strong-coupling limit of both models. In the thermodynamic limit, the two results could converge to a finite d.c. conductivity rather than an ideal conductor or insulator scenario.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to PR

The Precise Formula in a Sine Function Form of the norm of the Amplitude and the Necessary and Sufficient Phase Condition for Any Quantum Algorithm with Arbitrary Phase Rotations

In this paper we derived the precise formula in a sine function form of the norm of the amplitude in the desired state, and by means of he precise formula we presented the necessary and sufficient phase condition for any quantum algorithm with arbitrary phase rotations. We also showed that the phase condition: identical rotation angles, is a sufficient but not a necessary phase condition.Comment: 16 pages. Modified some English sentences and some proofs. Removed a table. Corrected the formula for kol on page 10. No figure

A key management architecture and protocols for secure smart grid communications

Providing encrypted communications among power grid components is expected to be a basic requirement of smart grid systems in the future. Here, we propose a key management architecture and associated protocols tailored to support encrypted smart grid communications. The architecture consists of two levels structured around the grid control system hierarchy. At the top level, which consist of control centers and regional coordinators, a bottom-up key structure is adopted using hash chaining and a logical key hierarchy. The lower level of the architecture consists of the regional coordinators (i.e., substations and distribution systems) and remote ends (e.g., meters and pole-top sensors) and utilizes a top-down key management approach built on an inverse element method. The proposed key management schema supports the hierarchical structure of the smart grid control mechanisms, and it takes the resource and electronic/physical security differences of the control levels into account. We define a set of protocols utilizing the architecture to provide secure unicast, multicast, and broadcast communications. Furthermore, we illustrate how the architecture is flexible enough to easily handle power grid nodes joining and leaving the system at the different levels. Lastly, we compare the proposed schema with existing ones and show that our architecture can achieve efficient key management to provide secure communications. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd