Approaches to environmental noise policy in Australia

Australia is a federation of six states and two territories. Legislation for environmental noise is the responsibility of each of the Australian states and territories. The Federal government has the responsibility for national issues such as aircraft noise and also to encourage harmonisation of the legislation and regulations among the states and territories. For some decades there has been a document on environmental noise produced by Standards Australia but it is up to each state or territory to call up part or all of this Standard. For general environmental noise some states use comparison with background as the criteria while others define the criteria levels based on land use zones. Both approaches have their advantages and drawbacks. This paper will compare and contrast the different legislation and regulations and discuss the issue of 'cross border' disputes.

Noise in detection of qubit states using a quantum point contact

We present a model for detection of the states of a coupled quantum dots (qubit) by a quantum point contact. Most proposals for measurements of states of quantum systems are idealized. However in a real laboratory the measurements cannot be perfect due to practical devices and circuits. The models using ideal devices are not sufficient for describing the detection information of the states of the quantum systems. Our model therefore includes the extension to a non-ideal measurement device case using an equivalent circuit. We derive a quantum trajectory that describes the stochastic evolution of the state of the system of the qubit and the measuring device. We calculate the noise power spectrum of tunnelling events in an ideal and a non-ideal quantum point contact measurement respectively. We found that, for the strong coupling case it is difficult to obtain information of the quantum processes in the qubit by measurements using a non-ideal quantum point contact. The noise spectra can also be used to estimate the limits of applicability of the ideal model.