Above the noise

Temperature dependence of electric field noise above gold surfaces.

Electric field noise from fluctuating patch potentials is a significant problem for a broad range of precision experiments, including trapped ion quantum computation and single spin detection. Recent results demonstrated strong suppression of this noise by cryogenic cooling, suggesting an underlying thermal process. We present measurements characterizing the temperature and frequency dependence...

The Reliability Function for the Additive White Gaussian Noise Channel at Rates above the Capacity

We consider the additive white Gaussian noise channels. We prove that the error probability of decoding tends to one exponentially for rates above the capacity and derive the optimal exponent function. We shall demonstrate that the information spectrum approach is quite useful for investigating this problem. Keywords—Additive white Gaussian noise channels, Strong converse theorem, Information s...

Comparison of the scintillation noise above different observatories measured with MASS instruments

Aims. Scintillation noise is a major limitation of ground-based photometric precision. Methods. An extensive dataset of stellar scintillation collected at 11 astronomical sites world-wide with MASS instruments was used to estimate the scintillation noise of large telescopes in the fast photometry and traditional long-exposure regime. Results. Statistical distributions of the corresponding param...

The View from Above

2 5 Se p 20 09 Studies of Millimeter - Wave Atmospheric Noise Above Mauna Kea

We report measurements of the fluctuations in atmospheric emission (atmospheric noise) above Mauna Kea recorded with Bolocam at 143 and 268 GHz from the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO). The 143 GHz data were collected during a 40 night observing run in late 2003, and the 268 GHz observations were made in early 2004 and early 2005 over a total of 60 nights. Below ≃ 0.5 Hz, the data time-...