The observation of quantized nanomechanical oscillations by detecting femtometer-scale displacements is a significant challenge for experimentalists. We propose that phonon blockade can serve as a signature of quantum behavior in nanomechanical resonators. In analogy to photon blockade and Coulomb blockade for electrons, the main idea for phonon blockade is that the second phonon cannot be excited when there is one phonon in the nonlinear oscillator. To realize phonon blockade, a superconducting quantum two-level system is coupled to the nanomechanical resonator and is used to induce the phonon self-interaction. Using Monte Carlo simulations, the dynamics of the induced nonlinear oscillator is studied via the Cahill-Glauber s-parametrized quasiprobability distributions. We show how the oscillation of the resonator can occur in the quantum regime and demonstrate how the phonon blockade can be observed with currently accessible experimental parameters.

Voice impersonation is not the same as voice transformation, although the latter is an essential element of it. In voice impersonation, the resultant voice must convincingly convey the impression of having been naturally produced by the target speaker, mimicking not only the pitch and other perceivable signal qualities, but also the style of the target speaker. In this paper, we propose a novel neuralnetwork based speech quality-and style-mimicry framework for the synthesis of impersonated voices. The framework is built upon a fast and accurate generative adversarial network model. Given spectrographic representations of source and target speakers' voices, the model learns to mimic the target speaker's voice quality and style, regardless of the linguistic content of either's voice, generating a synthetic spectrogram from which the time-domain signal is reconstructed using the Griffin-Lim method. In effect, this model reframes the well-known problem of style-transfer for images as the problem of style-transfer for speech signals, while intrinsically addressing the problem of durational variability of speech sounds. Experiments demonstrate that the model can generate extremely convincing samples of impersonated speech. It is even able to impersonate voices across different genders effectively. Results are qualitatively evaluated using standard procedures for evaluating synthesized voices.Index Terms-Voice impersonation, generative adversarial network, style transformation, style transfer * Thanks to Raymond (Yangyang) Xia for his suggestions and advice † This work was funded by Schmidt Sciences, Palo Alto, CA.

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The fluctuation-dissipation relation is well known for a quantum open system with energy dissipation. In this paper a similar underlying relation is found between the bath fluctuation and the dephasing of the quantum open system, for which energy is conserved, but the information is leaking into the bath. To obtain this relation we revisit the universal, but simple dephasing model with a quantum nondemolition interaction between the bath and the open system. Then we show that the decoherence factor describing the dephasing process is factorized into two parts, to indicate the two sources of dephasing, the vacuum quantum fluctuation, and the thermal excitations defined in the initial state of finite temperature.