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At least 649 records · Page 36

Laboratory Strategies for Hydrate Formation in Fine‐Grained Sediments

Abstract Fine‐grained sediments limit hydrate nucleation, shift the phase boundary, and hinder gas supply. Laboratory experiments in this study explore different strategies to overcome these challenges, including the use of a more soluble guest molecule rather than methane, grain‐scale gas‐storage within porous diatoms, ice‐to‐hydrate transformation to grow lenses at predefined locations, forced gas injection into water saturated sediments, and long‐term guest molecule transport. Tomographic images and thermal and pressure data provide rich information on hydrate formation and morphology. Results show that hydrate formation is inherently displacive in fine‐grained sediments; lenses are thicker and closer to each other in compressible, high specific surface area sediments subjected to low effective stress. Temperature and pressure trajectories follow a shifted phase boundary that is consistent with capillary effects. Exo‐pore growth results in freshly formed hydrate with a striped and porous structure; this open structure becomes an effective pathway for gas transport to the growing hydrate front. Ice‐to‐hydrate transformation goes through a liquid stage at premelt temperatures; then, capillarity and cryogenic suction compete, and some water becomes imbibed into the sediment faster than hydrate reformation. The geometry of hydrate lenses and the internal hydrate structure continue evolving long after the exothermal response to hydrate formation has completely decayed. Multiple time‐dependent processes occur during hydrate formation, including gas, water and heat transport, sediment compressibility, reaction rate, and the stochastic nucleation process. Hydrate formation strategies conceived for this study highlight the inherent difficulties in emulating hydrate formation in fine‐grained sediments within the relatively short time scale available for laboratory experiments.

Lei, L.↗

Acquisition of material properties in production for sheet metal forming processes

In past work a measurement system for the in-line acquisition of material properties was developed at IVP. This system is based on the non-destructive eddy-current principle. Using this system, a 100% control of material properties of the processed material is possible. The system can be used for ferromagnetic materials like standard steels as well as paramagnetic materials like Aluminum and stainless steel. Used as an in-line measurement system, it can be configured as a stand-alone system to control material properties and sort out inapplicable material or as part of a control system of the forming process. In both cases, the acquired data can be used as input data for numerical simulations, e.g. stochastic simulations based on real world data.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Exact analytical solutions to the master equation of quantum Brownian motion for a general environment

Research Highlights: > We study the model of a quantum oscillator linearly coupled to a bath of oscillators. > We derive the master equation and solutions for general spectra and temperatures. > We generalize to cases with an external force and arbitrary number of oscillators. > Other derivations have incorrect diffusion and force response for nonlocal damping. > We give exact results for ohmic, sub-ohmic and supra-ohmic environments. - Abstract: We revisit the model of a quantum Brownian oscillator linearly coupled to an environment of quantum oscillators at finite temperature. By introducing a compact and particularly well-suited formulation, we give a rather quick and direct derivation of the master equation and its solutions for general spectral functions and arbitrary temperatures. The flexibility of our approach allows for an immediate generalization to cases with an external force and with an arbitrary number of Brownian oscillators. More importantly, we point out an important mathematical subtlety concerning boundary-value problems for integro-differential equations which led to incorrect master equation coefficients and impacts on the description of nonlocal dissipation effects in all earlier derivations. Furthermore, we provide explicit, exact analytical results for the master equation coefficients and its solutions in a wide variety of cases, including ohmic, sub-ohmic and supra-ohmic environments with a finite cut-off.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Accurate numerical simulations of open quantum systems using spectral tensor trains

Decoherence between qubits is a major bottleneck in quantum computations. Decoherence results from intrinsic quantum and thermal fluctuations as well as noise in the external fields that perform the measurement and preparation processes. With prescribed colored noise spectra for intrinsic and extrinsic noise, we present a numerical method, Quantum Accelerated Stochastic Propagator Evaluation (Q-ASPEN), to solve the time-dependent noise-averaged reduced density matrix in the presence of intrinsic and extrinsic noise. Q-ASPEN is arbitrarily accurate and can be applied to provide estimates for the resources needed to error-correct quantum computations. We employ spectral tensor trains, which combine the advantages of tensor networks and pseudospectral methods, as a variational ansatz to the quantum relaxation problem and optimize the ansatz using methods typically used to train neural networks. Here, the spectral tensor trains in Q-ASPEN make accurate calculations with tens of quantum levels feasible. We present benchmarks for Q-ASPEN on the spin-boson model in the presence of intrinsic noise and on a quantum chain of up to 32 sites in the presence of extrinsic noise. In our benchmark, the memory cost of Q-ASPEN scales as a low-order polynomial in the size of the system once the number of system states surpasses the number of basis functions used in the spectral expansion.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

DYNAMICAL MODELS FOR NGC 6503 USING A MARKOV CHAIN MONTE CARLO TECHNIQUE

We use Bayesian statistics and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques to construct dynamical models for the spiral galaxy NGC 6503. The constraints include surface brightness (SB) profiles which display a Freeman Type II structure; H I and ionized gas rotation curves; the stellar rotation, which is nearly coincident with the ionized gas curve; and the line of sight stellar dispersion, which displays a {sigma}-drop at the center. The galaxy models consist of a Sersic bulge, an exponential disk with an optional inner truncation and a cosmologically motivated dark halo. The Bayesian/MCMC technique yields the joint posterior probability distribution function for the input parameters, allowing constraints on model parameters such as the halo cusp strength, structural parameters for the disk and bulge, and mass-to-light ratios. We examine several interpretations of the data: the Type II SB profile may be due to dust extinction, to an inner truncated disk, or to a ring of bright stars, and we test separate fits to the gas and stellar rotation curves to determine if the gas traces the gravitational potential. We test each of these scenarios for bar stability, ruling out dust extinction. We also find that the gas likely does not trace the gravitational potential, since the predicted stellar rotation curve, which includes asymmetric drift, is then inconsistent with the observed stellar rotation curve. The disk is well fit by an inner-truncated profile, but the possibility of ring formation by a bar to reproduce the Type II profile is also a realistic model. We further find that the halo must have a cuspy profile with {gamma} {approx}> 1; the bulge has a lower M/L than the disk, suggesting a star-forming component in the center of the galaxy; and the bulge, as expected for this late-type galaxy, has a low Sersic index with n{sub b} {approx} 1-2, suggesting a formation history dominated by secular evolution.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Non-Markovian master equation for a damped oscillator with time-varying parameters

We derive an exact non-Markovian master equation that generalizes the previous work [Hu, Paz and Zhang, Phys. Rev. D 45, 2843 (1992)] to damped harmonic oscillators with time-varying parameters. This is achieved by exploiting the linearity of the system and operator solution in Heisenberg picture. Our equation governs the non-Markovian quantum dynamics when the system is modulated by external devices. As an application, we apply our equation to parity kick decoupling problems. The time-dependent dissipative coefficients in the master equation are shown to be modified drastically when the system is driven by {pi} pulses. For coherence protection to be effective, our numerical results indicate that kicking period should be shorter than memory time of the bath. The effects of using soft pulses in an ohmic bath are also discussed.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Decoherence control in different environments

We investigate two techniques for controlling decoherence, focusing on the crucial role played by the environmental spectrum. We show how environments with different spectra lead to very different dynamical behaviors. Our study clearly proves that such differences must be taken into account when designing decoherence control schemes. The two techniques we consider are reservoir engineering and quantum Zeno control. We focus on a quantum harmonic oscillator initially prepared in a nonclassical state and derive analytically its non-Markovian dynamics in the presence of different bosonic thermal environments. On the one hand, we show how, by modifying the spectrum of the environment, it is possible to prolong or reduce the life of a Schroedinger cat state. On the other hand, we study the effect of nonselective energy measurements on the degradation of quantumness of initial Fock states. In this latter case, we see that the crossover between quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects, discussed by Maniscalco et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 130402 (2006)], is highly sensitive to the details of the spectrum. In particular, for certain types of spectra, even very small variations of the system frequency may cause a measurement-induced acceleration of decoherence rather than its inhibition.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Non-Markovian effects on quantum-communication protocols

We show how, under the influence of non-Markovian environments, two different maximally entangled Bell states give rise to states that have equal classical correlations and the same capacities to violate the Bell-Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality, but intriguingly differing usefulness for teleportation and dense coding. We elucidate how different entanglement measures like negativity and concurrence, and two different measures of quantum discord, could account for these behaviors. In particular, we explicitly show how the Ollivier-Zurek measure of discord directly accounts for one state being a better resource for dense coding compared to another. Our study leads to several important issues about these measures of discord.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Experimental investigation of the non-Markovian dynamics of classical and quantum correlations

We experimentally investigate the dynamics of classical and quantum correlations of a Bell diagonal state in a non-Markovian dephasing environment. The sudden transition from a classical to a quantum decoherence regime is observed during the dynamics of a Bell diagonal state. Due to the refocusing effect of the overall relative phase, the quantum correlation revives from near zero and then decays again in the subsequent evolution. However, the non-Markovian effect is too weak to revive the classical correlation, which remains constant in the same evolution range. With the implementation of an optical {sigma}{sub x} operation, the sudden transition from a quantum to a classical revival regime is obtained, and correlation echoes are formed. Our method can be used to control the revival time of correlations, which would be important in quantum memory.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Average entanglement for Markovian quantum trajectories

We study the evolution of the entanglement of noninteracting qubits coupled to reservoirs under monitoring of the reservoirs by means of continuous measurements. We calculate the average of the concurrence of the qubits wave function over all quantum trajectories. For two qubits coupled to independent baths subjected to local measurements, this average decays exponentially with a rate depending on the measurement scheme only. This contrasts with the known disappearance of entanglement after a finite time for the density matrix in the absence of measurements. For two qubits coupled to a common bath, the mean concurrence can vanish at discrete times. Our analysis applies to arbitrary quantum jump or quantum state diffusion dynamics in the Markov limit. We discuss the best measurement schemes to protect entanglement in specific examples.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Scalability of decoherence control in entangled systems

We investigate the scaling of decoherence rates and their dynamical suppression with the number N of qubits in various entangled states. Remarkably, for sufficiently large N, coherence time is always in the Zeno regime. This changes the scaling to the square root of the Markov-regime scaling. We find that a simple and effective control strategy is to locally modulate the individual qubits and thereby not only suppress the decoherence rate of each qubit, but also reduce the decoherence scaling of entangled states that are particularly fragile, from N{sup 2} to N, resulting in a dramatic reduction of the decoherence (by orders of magnitude). Surprisingly, the conditions for the effectiveness of such decoherence control are independent of N.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Suppression of decoherence and disentanglement by the exchange interaction

Entangled qubit pairs can serve as a quantum memory or as a resource for quantum communication. The utility of such pairs is measured by how long they take to disentangle or decohere. To answer the question of whether qubit-qubit interactions can prolong entanglement, we calculate the dissipative dynamics of a pair of qubits coupled via the exchange interaction in the presence of random telegraph noise and 1/f noise. We show that for maximally entangled (Bell) states, the exchange interaction generally suppresses decoherence and disentanglement. This suppression is more apparent for random telegraph noise if the noise is non-Markovian, whereas for 1/f noise the exchange interaction should be comparable in magnitude to the strongest noise source. The entangled singlet-triplet superposition state of two qubits ({psi}{sub {+-}} Bell state) can be protected by the interaction, while for the triplet-triplet state ({phi}{sub {+-}} Bell state), it is less effective. Thus the former is more suitable for encoding quantum information.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Deep learning categorization of infrasound array data

Here we develop a deep learning-based infrasonic detection and categorization methodology that uses convolutional neural networks with self-attention layers to identify stationary and non-stationary signals in infrasound array processing results. Using features extracted from the coherence and direction-of-arrival information from beamforming at different infrasound arrays, our model more reliably detects signals compared with raw waveform data. Using three infrasound stations maintained as part of the International Monitoring System, we construct an analyst-reviewed data set for model training and evaluation. We construct models using a 4-category framework, a generalized noise vs non-noise detection scheme, and a signal-of-interest (SOI) categorization framework that merges short duration stationary and non-stationary categories into a single SOI category. We evaluate these models using a combination of k-fold cross-validation, comparison with an existing “state-of-the-art” detector, and a transportability analysis. Although results are mixed in distinguishing stationary and non-stationary short duration signals, f-scores for the noise vs non-noise and SOI analyses are consistently above 0.96, implying that deep learning-based infrasonic categorization is a highly accurate means of identifying signals-of-interest in infrasonic data records.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Earth-based navigation capabilities for outer planet missions.

The role of new Earth-based radio metric data types and of advanced estimation algorithms in navigating an outer planet spacecraft in the vicinity of Saturn has been analyzed. The data types included in the study consist of conventional range and range-rate measurements taken from a single station and simultaneous and nearly simultaneous measurements obtained from pairs of stations during overlapping viewing periods. The utility of a third data set that is produced by explicitly differencing the simultaneous points has also been investigated. The data was processed with a conventional least squares batch filter and with a sequential filter that estimated parameters describing small stochastic accelerations (process noise) acting on the spacecraft. It was found that process noise can produce large errors in the estimates obtained from batch filtering conventional and simultaneous data, and that the only batch filtered estimates that were reliable were those obtained from differenced data. The performance of the simultaneous data in the presence of process noise is greatly improved by sequential filtering.

Hildebrand, C. E.↗

Receiver processing for direct-detection optical communication systems.

A model that is sufficiently general to describe the predominant statistical characteristics of the output of many real optical detectors is formulated. This model is used to study the optimum receiver processing for direct-detection optical communication systems. In particular, the structures of detectors and estimators for filtered doubly stochastic Poisson processes (DSPP) observed in additive white Gaussian noise are considered. Representations for the posterior statistics of a vector Markov process that modulates the intensity of the DSPP are obtained.

Hoversten, E. V.↗

ENSO regimes and the late 1970's climate shift: The role of synoptic weather and South Pacific ocean spiciness

South Pacific subtropical density compensated temperature and salinity (spiciness) anomalies are known to be associated with decadal equatorial variability, however, the mechanisms by which such disturbances are generated, advect and the degree to which they modulate the equatorial thermocline remains controversial. During the late 1970's a climate regime transition preceded a period of strong and sustained El Nino events. Using an ocean general circulation model forced by the constituent mechanical and thermodynamic components of the reanalysed atmosphere we show that the late 1970's transition coincided with the arrival of a large-scale, subsurface cold and fresh water anomaly in the central tropical Pacific. An ocean reanalysis for the period 1990–2007 that assimilates subsurface Argo, XBT and CTD data, reveals that disturbances occur due to the subduction of negative surface salinity anomalies from near 30° S, 100° W which are advected along the σ=25–26 kgm{sup −3} isopycnal surfaces. These anomalies take, on average, seven years to reach the central equatorial Pacific where they may substantially perturb the thermocline before the remnants ultimately ventilate in the region of the western Pacific warm pool. Positive (warm–salty) disturbances, known to occur due to late winter diapycnal mixing and isopycnal outcropping, arise due to both subduction of subtropical mode waters and subsurface injection. On reaching the equatorial band (10° S–0° S) these disturbances tend to deepen the thermocline reducing the model's ENSO. In contrast the emergence of negative (cold–fresh) disturbances at the equator are associated with a shoaling of the thermocline and El Nino events. Process studies are used to show that the generation and advection of anomalous density compensated thermocline disturbances critically depend on stochastic forcing of the intrinsic ocean by weather. We further show that in the absence of the inter-annual component of the atmosphere forcing Central Pacific El Nino events are manifest.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Pade spectrum decompositions of quantum distribution functions and optimal hierarchical equations of motion construction for quantum open systems

Pade spectrum decomposition is an optimal sum-over-poles expansion scheme of Fermi function and Bose function [J. Hu, R. X. Xu, and Y. J. Yan, J. Chem. Phys. 133, 101106 (2010)]. In this work, we report two additional members to this family, from which the best among all sum-over-poles methods could be chosen for different cases of application. Methods are developed for determining these three Pade spectrum decomposition expansions at machine precision via simple algorithms. We exemplify the applications of present development with optimal construction of hierarchical equations-of-motion formulations for nonperturbative quantum dissipation and quantum transport dynamics. Numerical demonstrations are given for two systems. One is the transient transport current to an interacting quantum-dots system, together with the involved high-order co-tunneling dynamics. Another is the non-Markovian dynamics of a spin-boson system.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

TERMS PHOTOMETRY OF KNOWN TRANSITING EXOPLANETS

The Transit Ephemeris Refinement and Monitoring Survey conducts radial velocity and photometric monitoring of known exoplanets in order to refine planetary orbits and predictions of possible transit times. This effort is primarily directed toward planets not known to transit, but a small sample of our targets consists of known transiting systems. Here we present precision photometry for six WASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) planets acquired during their transit windows. We perform a Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis for each planet and combine these data with previous measurements to redetermine the period and ephemerides for these planets. These observations provide recent mid-transit times which are useful for scheduling future observations. Our results improve the ephemerides of WASP-4b, WASP-5b, and WASP-6b and reduce the uncertainties on the mid-transit time for WASP-29b. We also confirm the orbital, stellar, and planetary parameters of all six systems.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗