Department of Physics

Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

Quantum discord is a more general measure of quantum correlations than entanglement and has been proposed as a resource in certain quantum information processing tasks. The computation of discord is mostly confined to two-qubit systems for which an analytical calculational scheme is available. The utilization of quantum correlations in quantum information-based applications is limited by the problem of decoherence, i.e., the loss of coherence due to the inevitable interaction of a quantum system with its environment. The dynamics of quantum correlations due to decoherence may be studied in the Kraus operator formalism for different types of quantum channels representing system-environment interactions. In this review, we describe the salient features of the dynamics of classical and quantum correlations in a two-qubit system under Markovian (memoryless) time evolution. The two-qubit state considered is described by the reduced density matrix obtained from the ground state of a spin model. The models considered include the transverse-field XY model in one dimension, a special case of which is the transverse-field Ising model, and the XXZ spin chain. The quantum channels studied include the amplitude damping, bit-flip, bit-phase-flip and phase-flip channels. The Kraus operator formalism is briefly introduced and the origins of different types of dynamics discussed. One can identify appropriate quantities associated with the dynamics of quantum correlations which provide signatures of quantum phase transitions in the spin models. Experimental observations of the different types of dynamics are also mentioned. © 2013 World Scientific Publishing Company.

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International Journal of Modern Physics B

Quantum discord, decoherence and quantum phase transition

Spin transport studies in graphene

Motor-driven bidirectional transport inside a cell is an intriguing phenomenon where multiple dyneins and kinesins drag cargoes and deliver them to specific locations. Quite often, both anterograde (plus) and retrograde (minus) directed motors reside simultaneously on the cargo and co-ordinate their activity such that the motion of the cargo looks like spells of plus directed and minus directed segments, with pauses in between. The stochastic tug-of-war model is widely used to analyze this motion, largely studied by computer simulations. Here, we present some analytical results for this model, such as the average durations of plus and minus-run segments and tug-of-war events as well as probabilities of persistence and reversal of directions following a tug-of-war. We show that cargo motion has memory in case of 2 dyneins and 1 kinesin driving together, while it is absent when only a dynein and a kinesin is involved. © 2013 American Institute of Physics.

AIP Conference Proceedings

Bidirectional transport of motor-driven cargoes in cell: A random walk with memory

Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru

Phase Behaviour of Supercooled Liquid Silicon

The closure of long equilibrated denaturation bubbles in DNA is studied using Brownian dynamics simulations. A minimal mesoscopic model is used where the double helix is made of two interacting bead-spring freely rotating strands, with a nonzero torsional modulus in the duplex state, κφ= 200 to 300kBT. For DNAs of lengths N=40 to 100 base pairs (bps) with a large initial bubble in their middle, long closure times of 0.1 to 100μs are found. The bubble starts winding from both ends until it reaches a ≈10 bp metastable state due to the large elastic energy stored in the bubble. The final closure is limited by three competing mechanisms depending on κφ and N: arms diffusion until their alignment, bubble diffusion along the DNA until one end is reached, or local Kramers process (crossing over a torsional energy barrier). For clamped ends or long DNAs, the closure occurs via this last temperature-activated mechanism, yielding a good quantitative agreement with the experiments. © 2013 American Physical Society.

Physical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics

Slow closure of denaturation bubbles in DNA: Twist matters

Graphene's extremely small intrinsic spin-orbit (SO) interaction makes the realization of many interesting phenomena such as topological/quantum spin Hall states and the spin Hall effect (SHE) practically impossible. Recently, it was predicted that the introduction of adatoms in graphene would enhance the SO interaction by the conversion of sp 2 to sp 3 bonds. However, introducing adatoms and yet keeping graphene metallic, that is, without creating electronic (Anderson) localization, is experimentally challenging. Here, we show that the controlled addition of small amounts of covalently bonded hydrogen atoms is sufficient to induce a colossal enhancement of the SO interaction by three orders of magnitude. This results in a SHE at zero external magnetic fields at room temperature, with non-local spin signals up to 100 Ω; orders of magnitude larger than in metals. The non-local SHE is, further, directly confirmed by Larmor spin-precession measurements. From this and the length dependence of the non-local signal we extract a spin relaxation length of ∼1 μm, a spin relaxation time of ∼ 90 ps and a SO strength of 2.5 meV. © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

Nature Physics

Colossal enhancement of spin-orbit coupling in weakly hydrogenated graphene

APS March Meeting Abstracts 2013, B16.

Colossal spin-orbit coupling in functionalized graphene

We study the the ground state fidelity and the ground state Loschmidt echo of a three-site interacting XX chain in presence of a staggered field which exhibits special types of quantum phase transitions due to change in the topology of the Fermi surface, apart from quantum phase transitions from gapped to gapless phases. We find that, on one hand, the fidelity is able to detect only the boundaries separating the gapped from the gapless phase; it is completely insensitive to the phase transition from the two Fermi points region to the four Fermi points region lying within this gapless phase. On the other hand, the Loschmidt echo shows a dip only at a special point in the entire phase diagram and hence fails to detect any quantum phase transition associated with the present model. We provide appropriate arguments in support of this anomalous behavior. © 2013 American Physical Society.

Three-site interacting spin chain in a staggered field: Fidelity versus Loschmidt echo

Molecular motors are specialized proteins that perform active, directed transport of cellular cargoes on cytoskeletal filaments. In many cases, cargo motion powered by motor proteins is found to be bidirectional, and may be viewed as a biased random walk with fast unidirectional runs interspersed with slow tug-of-war states. The statistical properties of this walk are not known in detail, and here, we study memory and bias, as well as directional correlations between successive runs in bidirectional transport. We show, based on a study of the direction-reversal probabilities of the cargo using a purely stochastic (tug-of-war) model, that bidirectional motion of cellular cargoes is, in general, a correlated random walk. In particular, while the motion of a cargo driven by two oppositely pulling motors is a Markovian random walk, memory of direction appears when multiple motors haul the cargo in one or both directions. In the latter case, the Markovian nature of the underlying single-motor processes is hidden by internal transitions between degenerate run and pause states of the cargo. Interestingly, memory is found to be a nonmonotonic function of the number of motors. Stochastic numerical simulations of the tug-of-war model support our mathematical results and extend them to biologically relevant situations. © 2013 American Physical Society.

Memory, bias, and correlations in bidirectional transport of molecular-motor-driven cargoes

Classifying the zero-temperature ground states of quantum field theories with finite charge density is a very interesting problem. Via holography, this problem is mapped to the classification of extremal charged black brane geometries with anti-de Sitter asymptotics. In a recent paper [1], we proposed a Bianchi classification of the extremal near-horizon geometries in five dimensions, in the case where they are homogeneous but, in general, anisotropic. Here, we extend our study in two directions: we show that Bianchi attractors can lead to new phases, and generalize the classification of homogeneous phases in a way suggested by holography. In the first direction, we show that hyperscaling violation can naturally be incorporated into the Bianchi horizons. We also find analytical examples of "striped" horizons. In the second direction, we propose a more complete classification of homogeneous horizon geometries where the natural mathematics involves real four-algebras with three dimensional sub-algebras. This gives rise to a richer set of possible near-horizon geometries, where the holographic radial direction is non-trivially intertwined with field theory spatial coordinates. We find examples of several of the new types in systems consisting of reasonably simple matter sectors coupled to gravity, while arguing that others are forbidden by the Null Energy Condition. Extremal horizons in four dimensions governed by three-algebras or four-algebras are also discussed. © 2013 SISSA.