Congressional Distributive Politics and State Economic Performance

This paper tests several theories of the effects of congressional representation on state economic growth. States that were represented by very senior Democratic congressmen grew more quickly during the 1953-1990 period than states that were represented by more junior congressional delegations. We find some, but weaker, evidence that states with a high fraction of their delegation on particularly influential committees also exhibit above-average growth. We also test partisan models of distributive politics by studying the relationship between a state's degree of political competition and its growth rate. Our findings support both nonpartisan and partisan models of congressional distributive politics. In spite of our findings with respect to economic growth, we can not detect any substantively important association between congressional delegation seniority, the degree of state political competition, and the geographic distribution of federal funds. The source of the growth relationships we identify therefore remains an open question.

ELSA: An Integrated, Semi-Automated Nebular Abundance Package

We present ELSA, a new modular software package, written in C, to analyze and manage spectroscopic data from emission-line objects. In addition to calculating plasma diagnostics and abundances from nebular emission lines, the software provides a number of convenient features including the ability to ingest logs produced by IRAF's splot task, to semi-automatically merge spectra in different wavelength ranges, and to automatically generate various data tables in machine-readable or LaTeX format. ELSA features a highly sophisticated interstellar reddening correction scheme that takes into account temperature and density effects as well as He II contamination of the hydrogen Balmer lines. Abundance calculations are performed using a 5-level atom approximation with recent atomic data, based on R. Henry's ABUN program. Improvements planned in the near future include use of a three-region ionization model, similar to IRAF's nebular package, error propagation, and the addition of ultraviolet and infrared line analysis capability. Detailed documentation for all aspects of ELSA are available at http://www.williams.edu/Astronomy/research/PN .Comment: 2 pages, contributed paper, IAU Symp. 234, Planetary Nebulae in Our Galaxy and Beyon

Geometric Aspects of Composite Pulses

Unitary operations acting on a quantum system must be robust against systematic errors in control parameters for reliable quantum computing. Composite pulse technique in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) realises such a robust operation by employing a sequence of possibly poor quality pulses. In this article, we demonstrate that two kinds of composite pulses, one compensates for a pulse length error in a one-qubit system and the other compensates for a J-coupling error in a twoqubit system, have vanishing dynamical phase and thereby can be seen as geometric quantum gates, which implement unitary gates by the holonomy associated with dynamics of cyclic vectors defined in the text.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Experimental Implementation of a Codeword Stabilized Quantum Code

A five-qubit codeword stabilized quantum code is implemented in a seven-qubit system using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Our experiment implements a good nonadditive quantum code which encodes a larger Hilbert space than any stabilizer code with the same length and capable of correcting the same kind of errors. The experimentally measured quantum coherence is shown to be robust against artificially introduced errors, benchmarking the success in implementing the quantum error correction code. Given the typical decoherence time of the system, our experiment illustrates the ability of coherent control to implement complex quantum circuits for demonstrating interesting results in spin qubits for quantum computing

Three path interference using nuclear magnetic resonance: a test of the consistency of Born's rule

The Born rule is at the foundation of quantum mechanics and transforms our classical way of understanding probabilities by predicting that interference occurs between pairs of independent paths of a single object. One consequence of the Born rule is that three way (or three paths) quantum interference does not exist. In order to test the consistency of the Born rule, we examine detection probabilities in three path intereference using an ensemble of spin-1/2 quantum registers in liquid state nuclear magnetic resonance (LSNMR). As a measure of the consistency, we evaluate the ratio of three way interference to two way interference. Our experiment bounded the ratio to the order of $10^{-3} \pm 10^{-3}$, and hence it is consistent with Born's rule.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures; Improved presentation of figures 1 and 4, changes made in section 2 to better describe the experiment, minor changes throughout, and added several reference

Multispin correlations and pseudo-thermalization of the transient density matrix in solid-state NMR: free induction decay and magic echo

Quantum unitary evolution typically leads to thermalization of generic interacting many-body systems. There are very few known general methods for reversing this process, and we focus on the magic echo, a radio-frequency pulse sequence known to approximately "rewind" the time evolution of dipolar coupled homonuclear spin systems in a large magnetic field. By combining analytic, numerical, and experimental results we systematically investigate factors leading to the degradation of magic echoes, as observed in reduced revival of mean transverse magnetization. Going beyond the conventional analysis based on mean magnetization we use a phase encoding technique to measure the growth of spin correlations in the density matrix at different points in time following magic echoes of varied durations and compare the results to those obtained during a free induction decay (FID). While considerable differences are documented at short times, the long-time behavior of the density matrix appears to be remarkably universal among the types of initial states considered - simple low order multispin correlations are observed to decay exponentially at the same rate, seeding the onset of increasingly complex high order correlations. This manifestly athermal process is constrained by conservation of the second moment of the spectrum of the density matrix and proceeds indefinitely, assuming unitary dynamics.Comment: 12 Pages, 9 figure

Hyper-Ramsey Spectroscopy of Optical Clock Transitions

We present non-standard optical Ramsey schemes that use pulses individually tailored in duration, phase, and frequency to cancel spurious frequency shifts related to the excitation itself. In particular, the field shifts and their uncertainties of Ramsey fringes can be radically suppressed (by 2-4 orders of magnitude) in comparison with the usual Ramsey method (using two equal pulses) as well as with single-pulse Rabi spectroscopy. Atom interferometers and optical clocks based on two-photon transitions, heavily forbidden transitions, or magnetically induced spectroscopy could significantly benefit from this method. In the latter case these frequency shifts can be suppressed considerably below a fractional level of 10^{-17}. Moreover, our approach opens the door for the high-precision optical clocks based on direct frequency comb spectroscopy.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Bethe Ansatz calculation of the spectral gap of the asymmetric exclusion process

We present a new derivation of the spectral gap of the totally asymmetric exclusion process on a half-filled ring of size L by using the Bethe Ansatz. We show that, in the large L limit, the Bethe equations reduce to a simple transcendental equation involving the polylogarithm, a classical special function. By solving that equation, the gap and the dynamical exponent are readily obtained. Our method can be extended to a system with an arbitrary density of particles. Keywords: ASEP, Bethe Ansatz, Dynamical Exponent, Spectral Gap

Designing Robust Unitary Gates: Application to Concatenated Composite Pulse

We propose a simple formalism to design unitary gates robust against given systematic errors. This formalism generalizes our previous observation [Y. Kondo and M. Bando, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 80, 054002 (2011)] that vanishing dynamical phase in some composite gates is essential to suppress amplitude errors. By employing our formalism, we naturally derive a new composite unitary gate which can be seen as a concatenation of two known composite unitary operations. The obtained unitary gate has high fidelity over a wider range of the error strengths compared to existing composite gates.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Major revision: improved presentation in Sec. 3, references and appendix adde