The Swift satellite early X-ray data show a very steep decay in most of the gamma-ray bursts light curves. This decay is either produced by the rapidly declining continuation of the central engine activity or by some leftover radiation starting right after the central engine shuts off. The latter scenario consists of the emission from an ‘ember’ that cools via adiabatic expansion and, if the je...

This paper presents an analysis of a Curzon and Alhborn thermal engine model where both internal irreversibilities and non-instantaneous adiabatic branches are considered, operating with maximum ecological function and maximum power output regimes. Its thermodynamic properties are shown, and an analysis of its local dynamic stability is performed. The results derived are compared throughout the...

Under a general framework, shortcuts to adiabatic processes are shown to be possible in classical systems. We study the distribution function of the work done on a small system initially prepared at thermal equilibrium. We find that the work fluctuations can be significantly reduced via shortcuts to adiabatic processes. For example, in the classical case, probabilities of having very large or a...

We propose an adiabatic quantum algorithm for generating a quantum pure state encoding of the PageRank vector, the most widely used tool in ranking the relative importance of internet pages. We present extensive numerical simulations which provide evidence that this algorithm can prepare the quantum PageRank state in a time which, on average, scales polylogarithmically in the number of web page...

Adam Frees,1 John King Gamble,2 Kenneth Rudinger,2 Eric Bach,3 Mark Friesen,2,* Robert Joynt,2 and S. N. Coppersmith2,† 1Department of Physics, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA 2Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA 3Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA (Received 11 De...