Improving coherence with nested environments

We have in mind a register of qubits for an quantum information system, and consider its decoherence in an idealized but typical situation. Spontaneous decay and other couplings to the far environment considered as the world outside the quantum apparatus will be neglected, while couplings to quantum states within the apparatus, i.e. to a near environment are assumed to dominate. Thus the central system couples to the near environment which in turn couples to a far environment. Considering that the dynamics in the near environment is not sufficiently well known or controllable, we shall use random matrix methods to obtain analytic results. We consider a simplified situation where the central system suffers weak dephasing from the near environment, which in turn is coupled randomly to the far environment. We find the anti-intuitive result that increasing the coupling between near and far environment actually protects the central qubit.

On the Nature of the Hot Component in the Symbiotic, Supersoft X-ray Binary AG Draconis

AG Dra is a symbiotic variable consisting of a metal poor, yellow giant mass donor under-filling its Roche lobe, and a hot accreting white dwarf, possibly surrounded by an optically thick, bright accretion disk which could be present from wind accretion. We constructed NLTE synthetic spectral models for white dwarf spectra and optically thick accretion disk spectra to model a FUSE spectrum of AG Dra, obtained when the hot component is viewed in front of the yellow giant. The spectrum has been de-reddened (E(B-V) = 0.05) and the model fitting carried out, with the distance regarded as a free parameter, but required to be larger than the Hipparcos lower limit of 1 kpc. We find that the best-fitting model is a bare accreting white dwarf with Mwd = 0.4 Msun, Teff = 80,000K and a model-derived distance of 1543 pc. Higher temperatures are ruled out due to excess flux at the shortest wavelengths while a lower temperature decreases the distance below 1 kpc. Any accretion disk which might be present is a only a minor contributor to the FUV flux. This raises the possibility that the soft X-rays originate from a very hot boundary layer between a putative accretion disk and the accreting star.

A generating function for non-standard orthogonal polynomials involving differences: the Meixner case

In this paper we deal with a family of non--standard polynomials orthogonal with respect to an inner product involving differences. This type of inner product is the so--called $Delta$--Sobolev inner product. Concretely, we consider the case in which both measures appearing in the inner product correspond to the Pascal distribution (the orthogonal polynomials associated to this distribution are known as Meixner polynomials). The aim of this work is to obtain a generating function for the $Delta$--Meixner--Sobolev orthogonal polynomials and, by using a limit process, recover a generating function for Laguerre--Sobolev orthogonal polynomials.