A conceptual framework for designing pharmaceutical reverse logistics networks in China

Over latest decade, Reverse Logistics (RL) has gained more and more attention from both industry and academia. In the past, most research on RL has been focused on automobile, electronic waste, computer, paper, package and package material. There is very little research and practice on drug recycling. Nevertheless, it is vital important to properly dispose expired drug because of hazardous contain which may harm to people and environment. In China, public awareness of the harmfulness of expired drugs is still very low and very few efforts have been made to recycle drugs. Therefore, this research aims to build up a conceptual framework to indentify factors of influencing drug recycling in China, from scratch borrowing from existing literature and industry practices in other recycling areas. This framework helps in designing reverse logistic (RL) network and also can provide a useful reference tool for policymakers at the local and national level. Furthermore, a primary research is planed to validate the framework and RL network.

Spectrally bounded operators from von Neumann algebras

We prove that every unital spectrally bounded operator from a properly infinite von Neumann algebra onto a semisimple Banach algebra is a Jordan homomorphism.

Entanglement between collective operators in a linear harmonic chain

We investigate entanglement between collective operators of two blocks of oscillators in an infinite linear harmonic chain. These operators are defined as averages over local operators (individual oscillators) in the blocks. On the one hand, this approach of "physical blocks" meets realistic experimental conditions, where measurement apparatuses do not interact with single oscillators but rather with a whole bunch of them, i.e., where in contrast to usually studied "mathematical blocks" not every possible measurement is allowed. On the other, this formalism naturally allows the generalization to blocks which may consist of several noncontiguous regions. We quantify entanglement between the collective operators by a measure based on the Peres-Horodecki criterion and show how it can be extracted and transferred to two qubits. Entanglement between two blocks is found even in the case where none of the oscillators from one block is entangled with an oscillator from the other, showing genuine bipartite entanglement between collective operators. Allowing the blocks to consist of a periodic sequence of subblocks, we verify that entanglement scales at most with the total boundary region. We also apply the approach of collective operators to scalar quantum field theory.