High-power collective charging of a solid-state quantum battery

Quantum information theorems state that it is possible to exploit collective quantum resources to greatly enhance the charging power of quantum batteries (QBs) made of many identical elementary units. We here present and solve a model of a QB that can be engineered in solid-state architectures. It consists of $N$ two-level systems coupled to a single photonic mode in a cavity. We contrast this collective model ("Dicke QB"), whereby entanglement is genuinely created by the common photonic mode, to the one in which each two-level system is coupled to its own separate cavity mode ("Rabi QB"). By employing exact diagonalization, we demonstrate the emergence of a quantum advantage in the charging power of Dicke QBs, which scales like $\sqrt{N}$ for $N\gg 1$.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Version v2 supersedes version v1 where a technical mistake was done in using the Holstein-Primakoff transformation. The quantum advantage in the maximum charging power discussed in version v1 has been found to be robust. We have also updated the list of author

A novel suicide gene therapy for the treatment of p16-overexpressing tumors

p16Ink4ais a potent cell cycle inhibitor engaged to support cell cycle arrest during cellular senescence. However, in tumors carrying mutations in key downstream effectors, p16Ink4ais highly expressed but fails to block cell proliferation. p16Ink4a-overexpressing tumor cells are highly aggressive and no targeted interventions are available. To study the effect of specific therapies, we generated murine sarcomas by overexpressing RAS oncogene and disrupting p53 activity. We observed that p16Ink4a-overxpressing murine sarcoma cells were resistant to ABT-263 and ABT-737, anti-cancer small molecules previously shown to eliminate p16Ink4a+senescent cells. We then generated sarcoma cells carrying a suicide and reporter gene, called 3MR, under the regulation of the full p16Ink4apromoter. Activation of the suicide efficiently killed p16Ink4a-overxpressing sarcoma cellsin vitroandin vivo. These data suggest that suicide gene therapy could represent an important therapeutic approach for the treatment of highly aggressive p16Ink4a+cancers

Are there communicative intentions?

Grice in pragmatics and Levelt in psycholinguistics have proposed models of human communication where the starting point of communicative action is an individual intention. This assumption, though, has to face serious objections with regard to the alleged existence of explicit representations of the communicative goals to be pursued. Here evidence is surveyed which shows that in fact speaking may ordinarily be a quite automatic activity prompted by contextual cues and driven by behavioural schemata abstracted away from social regularities. On the one hand, this means that there could exist no intentions in the sense of explicit representations of communicative goals, following from deliberate reasoning and triggering the communicative action. On the other hand, however, there are reasons to allow for a weaker notion of intention than this, according to which communication is an intentional affair, after all. Communicative action is said to be intentional in this weaker sense to the extent that it is subject to a double mechanism of control, with respect both to present-directed and future-directed intentions

Видатний український історик-музикознавець (М. О. Грінченко)

У статті розкриваються основні віхи життєвого й творчого шляху М. О. Грінченка. Характеризуються провідні тенденції еволюції українського музикознавства другої половини ХIХ – першої третини ХХ ст. Виявляється роль музично-історичної спадщини вченого в тогочасному музикознавчому процесі, а також її зв’язки з музично-історичними дослідженнями наступних радянських десятиліть, сучасного періоду.В статье раскрываются основне вехи жизненного и творческого пути Н. А. Гринченко. Характеризуються ведущие тенденции эволюции украинского музыковедения второй половины ХIХ – первой трети ХХ в. Выявляется роль музыкально-исторического наследия ученого в контексте музыковедческого процесса того времени, а также его связи с музыкально-историческими исследованиями последующих советских десятилетий, современного периода.In the article main events of the outstanding Ukrainian musicologist M. Grinchenko`s life are considered. There are characterized tendencies of the Ukrainian musicology development (the latter half of the 19th – the 1st triens of the 20th). There is brought out the role of scientific works by M. Grinchenko in the context of that time

LUCIFER@LBT view of star-forming galaxies in the cluster 7C 1756+6520 at z~1.4

Galaxy clusters are key places to study the contribution of {\it nature} (i.e. mass, morphology) and {\it nurture} (i.e.environment) in the formation and evolution of galaxies. Recently, a number of clusters at z$>$1, i.e. corresponding to the first epochs of the cluster formation, has been discovered and confirmed spectroscopically. We present new observations obtained with the {\sc LUCIFER} spectrograph at Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) of a sample of star-forming galaxies associated with a large scale structure around the radio galaxy 7C1756+6520 at z=1.42. Combining our spectroscopic data and the literature photometric data, we derived some of the properties of these galaxies: star formation rate, metallicity and stellar mass. With the aim of analyzing the effect of the cluster environment on galaxy evolution, we have located the galaxies in the plane of the so-called Fundamental Metallically Relation (FMR), which is known not to evolve with redshift up to z$=2.5$ for field galaxies, but it is still unexplored in rich environments at low and high redshift. We found that the properties of the galaxies in the cluster 7C 1756+6520 are compatible with the FMR which suggests that the effect of the environment on galaxy metallicity at this early epoch of cluster formation is marginal. As a side study, we also report the spectroscopic analysis of a bright AGN, belonging to the cluster, which shows a significant outflow of gas.Comment: Accepted for publication by MNRAS, 10 pages, 6 figures, 3 table