Enrico Maiorino

Integrated multimode interferometers with arbitrary designs for photonic boson sampling

Andrea Crespi, 2 Roberto Osellame, 2, ∗ Roberta Ramponi, 2 Daniel J. Brod, Ernesto F. Galvão, † Nicolò Spagnolo, Chiara Vitelli, 4 Enrico Maiorino, Paolo Mataloni, and Fabio Sciarrino ‡ Istituto di Fotonica e Nanotecnologie, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IFN-CNR), Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32, I-20133 Milano, Italy Dipartimento di Fisica, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32, I-20133 Milano, Italy Instituto de F́ısica, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Av. Gal. Milton Tavares de Souza s/n, Niterói, RJ, 24210-340, Brazil Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Università di Roma, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, I-00185 Roma, Italy Center of Life NanoScience @ La Sapienza, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Viale Regina Elena, 255, I-00185 Roma, Italy

General Rules for Bosonic Bunching in Multimode Interferometers

We perform a comprehensive set of experiments that characterize bosonic bunching of up to three photons in interferometers of up to 16 modes. Our experiments verify two rules that govern bosonic bunching. The first rule, obtained recently, predicts the average behavior of the bunching probability and is known as the bosonic birthday paradox. The second rule is new and establishes a n!-factor quantum enhancement for the probability that all n bosons bunch in a single output mode, with respect to the case of distinguishable bosons. In addition to its fundamental importance in phenomena such as Bose-Einstein condensation, bosonic bunching can be exploited in applications such as linear optical quantum computing and quantum-enhanced metrology.

Multifractal characterization of protein contact networks

The multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis of time series is able to reveal the presence of long-range correlations and, at the same time, to characterize the self-similarity of the series. The rich information derivable from the characteristic exponents and the multifractal spectrum can be further analyzed to discover important insights into the underlying dynamical process. In this paper, we employ multifractal analysis techniques in the study of protein contact networks. To this end, initially a network is mapped to three different time series, each of which is generated by a stationary unbiased random walk. To capture the peculiarities of the networks at different levels, we accordingly consider three observables at each vertex: the degree, the clustering coefficient, and the closeness centrality. To compare the results with suitable references, we consider also instances of three well-known network models and two typical time series with pure monofractal and multifractal properties. The first result of notable interest is that time series associated to protein contact networks exhibit long-range correlations (strong persistence), which are consistent with signals in-between the typical monofractal and multifractal behavior. Successively, a suitable embedding of the multifractal spectra allows to focus on ensemble properties, which in turn gives us the possibility to make further observations regarding the considered networks. In particular, we highlight the different role that small and large fluctuations of the considered observables play in the characterization of the network topology.

An overview and comparative analysis of Recurrent Neural Networks for Short Term Load Forecasting.

The key component in forecasting demand and consumption of resources in a supply network is an accurate prediction of real-valued time series. Indeed, both service interruptions and resource waste can be reduced with the implementation of an effective forecasting system. Significant research has thus been devoted to the design and development of methodologies for short term load forecasting over the past decades. A class of mathematical models, called Recurrent Neural Networks, are nowadays gaining renewed interest among researchers and they are replacing many practical implementation of the forecasting systems, previously based on static methods. Despite the undeniable expressive power of these architectures, their recurrent nature complicates their understanding and poses challenges in the training procedures. Recently, new important families of recurrent architectures have emerged and their applicability in the context of load forecasting has not been investigated completely yet. In this paper we perform a comparative study on the problem of Short-Term Load Forecast, by using different classes of state-of-the-art Recurrent Neural Networks. We test the reviewed models first on controlled synthetic tasks and then on different real datasets, covering important practical cases of study. We provide a general overview of the most important architectures and we define guidelines for configuring the recurrent networks to predict real-valued time series.

Analysis of Heat Kernel Highlights the Strongly Modular and Heat-Preserving Structure of Proteins

In this paper, we study the structure and dynamical properties of protein contact networks with respect to other biological networks, together with simulated archetypal models acting as probes. We consider both classical topological descriptors, such as modularity and statistics of the shortest paths, and different interpretations in terms of diffusion provided by the discrete heat kernel, which is elaborated from the normalized graph Laplacians. A principal component analysis shows high discrimination among the network types, by considering both the topological and heat kernel based vector characterizations. Furthermore, a canonical correlation analysis demonstrates the strong agreement among those two characterizations, providing thus an important justification in terms of interpretability for the heat kernel. Finally, and most importantly, the focused analysis of the heat kernel provides a way to yield insights on the fact that proteins have to satisfy specific structural design constraints that the other considered networks do not need to obey. Notably, the heat trace decay of an ensemble of varying-size proteins denotes subdiffusion, a peculiar property of proteins.

Learning an unknown transformation via a genetic approach

Recent developments in integrated photonics technology are opening the way to the fabrication of complex linear optical interferometers. The application of this platform is ubiquitous in quantum information science, from quantum simulation to quantum metrology, including the quest for quantum supremacy via the boson sampling problem. Within these contexts, the capability to learn efficiently the unitary operation of the implemented interferometers becomes a crucial requirement. In this letter we develop a reconstruction algorithm based on a genetic approach, which can be adopted as a tool to characterize an unknown linear optical network. We report an experimental test of the described method by performing the reconstruction of a 7-mode interferometer implemented via the femtosecond laser writing technique. Further applications of genetic approaches can be found in other contexts, such as quantum metrology or learning unknown general Hamiltonian evolutions.

Data-driven detrending of nonstationary fractal time series with echo state networks

Abstract In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven approach for removing trends (detrending) from nonstationary, fractal and multifractal time series. We consider real-valued time series relative to measurements of an underlying dynamical system that evolves through time. We assume that such a dynamical process is predictable to a certain degree by means of a class of recurrent networks called Echo State Network (ESN), which are capable to model a generic dynamical process. In order to isolate the superimposed (multi)fractal component of interest, we define a data-driven filter by leveraging on the ESN prediction capability to identify the trend component of a given input time series. Specifically, the (estimated) trend is removed from the original time series and the residual signal is analyzed with the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis procedure to verify the correctness of the detrending procedure. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique, we consider several synthetic time series consisting of different types of trends and fractal noise components with known characteristics. We also process a real-world dataset, the sunspot time series, which is well-known for its multifractal features and has recently gained attention in the complex systems field. Results demonstrate the validity and generality of the proposed detrending method based on ESNs.

A generative model for protein contact networks

In this paper, we present a generative model for protein contact networks (PCNs). The soundness of the proposed model is investigated by focusing primarily on mesoscopic properties elaborated from the spectra of the graph Laplacian. To complement the analysis, we also study the classical topological descriptors, such as statistics of the shortest paths and the important feature of modularity. Our experiments show that the proposed model results in a considerable improvement with respect to two suitably chosen generative mechanisms, mimicking with better approximation real PCNs in terms of diffusion properties elaborated from the normalized Laplacian spectra. However, as well as the other network models, it does not reproduce with sufficient accuracy the shortest paths structure. To compensate this drawback, we designed a second step involving a targeted edge reconfiguration process. The ensemble of reconfigured networks denotes further improvements that are statistically significant. As an important byproduct of our study, we demonstrate that modularity, a well-known property of proteins, does not entirely explain the actual network architecture characterizing PCNs. In fact, we conclude that modularity, intended as a quantification of an underlying community structure, should be considered as an emergent property of the structural organization of proteins. Interestingly, such a property is suitably optimized in PCNs together with the feature of path efficiency.

On the Long-Term Correlations and Multifractal Properties of Electric Arc Furnace Time Series

In this paper, we study long-term correlations and multifractal properties elaborated from time series of three-phase current signals from an industrial electric arc furnace. Implicit sinusoidal trends are suitably detected by considering the scaling of the fluctuation functions. Time series are then filtered via a Fourier-based analysis to remove such strong periodicities. In the filtered time series we detected long-term, positive correlations. The presence of positive correlations is in agreement with the typical V–I characteristic (hysteresis) of the electric arc furnace, thus providing a sound physical justification for the memory effects found in the current time series. The multifractal signature is strong enough in the filtered time series to be effectively classified as multifractal.

An agent-based algorithm exploiting multiple local dissimilarities for clusters mining and knowledge discovery

We propose a multi-agent algorithm able to automatically discover relevant regularities in a given dataset, determining at the same time the set of configurations of the adopted parametric dissimilarity measure that yield compact and separated clusters. Each agent operates independently by performing a Markovian random walk on a weighted graph representation of the input dataset. Such a weighted graph representation is induced by a specific parameter configuration of the dissimilarity measure adopted by an agent for the search. During its lifetime, each agent evaluates different parameter configurations and takes decisions autonomously for one cluster at a time. Results show that the algorithm is able to discover parameter configurations that yield a consistent and interpretable collection of clusters. Moreover, we demonstrate that our algorithm shows comparable performances with other similar state-of-the-art algorithms when facing specific clustering problems. Notably, we compare our method with respect to several graph-based clustering algorithms and a well-known subspace search method.