We consider a two-dimensional particle of charge e interacting with a homogeneous magnetic field perpendicular to the plane and a potential well which is transported along a closed loop in the plane. We show that a bound state corresponding to a simple isolated eigenvalue acquires at that Berry's phase equal to 2 sgn e times the number of flux quanta through the oriented area encircled by the loop. We also argue that this is a purely quantum effect since the corresponding Hannay angle is zero.

We prove that a random map drawn from any class \mathfrak{C} of polynomial maps from (F_q)^n to (F_q)^{n+r} that is (i) totally random in the affine terms, and (ii) has a negligible chance of being not strongly one-way, provides a secure PRNG (hence a secure stream cipher) for any q. Plausible choices for are semi-sparse (i.e., the affine terms are truly random) systems and other systems that are easy to evaluate from a small (compared to a generic map) number of parameters. To our knowledge, there are no other positive results for provable security of specialized polynomial systems, in particular sparse ones (which are natural candidates to investigate for speed). We can build a family of provably secure stream ciphers a rough implementation of which at the same security level can be more than twice faster than an optimized QUAD (and any other provably secure stream ciphers proposed so far), and uses much less storage. This may also help build faster provably secure hashes. We also examine the effects of recent results on specialization on security, e.g., Aumasson-Meier (ICISC 2007), which precludes Merkle-Damgaard compression using polynomials systems {uniformly very sparse in every degree} from being universally collision-free. We conclude that our ideas are consistent with and complements these new results. We think that we can build secure primitives based on specialized (versus generic) polynomial maps which are more efficient.

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Using the complex coloring method, we present the graphs of the quantum dilogarithm function Gb(z) and visualize its analytic and asymptotic behaviours. In particular we demonstrate the limiting process when the modified Gb(z)→Γ(z) as b→0. We also survey the relations of Gb(z) with different variants of the quantum dilogarithm function.

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