Surgical site infections (SSIs) are a major health care-related problem in Brazil. SSIs are considered the third most prevalent sort of infection in our country. A national study carried out by the Ministry of Health of Brazil in 1999 found SSI in 11% of all surgical procedures analyzed.1 The recent review article by Chlebicki et al,2 whose metaanalysis suggested no benefit of using chlorhexidi...

We derive rigorous truncation-error bounds for the spin-boson model and its generalizations to arbitrary quantum systems interacting with bosonic baths. For the numerical simulation of such baths, the truncation of both the number of modes and the local Hilbert-space dimensions is necessary. We derive superexponential Lieb-Robinson-type bounds on the error when restricting the bath to finitely ...

The conventional rinsing after bleaching to remove the residual hydrogen peroxide, harmful to the dyes either in solution or on the fabric, was replaced by enzymatic cleaning using catalases. The catalasetreated bleaching liquor was reused for dyeing. Though no hydrogen peroxide was detected after the enzymatic process, the bleaching bath composition caused unacceptable colour changes on dyed f...

We study a quantum XX chain coupled to two heat reservoirs that act on multiple sites and are kept at different temperatures and chemical potentials. The baths are described by Lindblad dissipators, which are constructed by direct coupling to the fermionic normal modes of the chain. Using a perturbative method, we are able to find analytical formulas for all steady-state properties of the syste...

– We consider a discrete quantum system coupled to a finite bath, which may consist of only one particle, in contrast to the standard baths which usually consist of continua of oscillators, spins, etc. We find that such finite baths may nevertheless equilibrate the system though not necessarily in the way predicted by standard open system techniques. This behavior results regardless of the init...