Physics

Motivated by puzzles in quantum gravity AdS/CFT, Lenny Susskind posed the following question: supposing one had the technological ability to distinguish a macroscopic superposition of two given states |v> and |w> from incoherent mixture of those states, would one also have the technological ability to map |v> to |w> and vice versa?  More precisely, how does the quantum circuit complexity of the one task relate to the quantum circuit complexity of the other?  Here we resolve Susskind's question -- showing that the two complexities are essentially identical, even for approximate versions of these tasks, with the one caveat that a unitary transformation that maps |v> to |w> and |w> to -|v> need not imply any distinguishing ability.  Informally, "if you had the ability to prove Schrödinger's cat was in superposition, you'd necessarily also have the ability to bring a dead cat back to life."  I'll also discuss the optimality of this little result and some of its implications.

Paper (with Yosi Atia) in preparation

Fundamental physics (including physics beyond the Standard Model) can be tested using table-top precision measurements. The talk will describe measurements of the size of the proton, the fine-structure constant and the electric dipole moment of the electron. Two recently completed measurements will be described. For the first measurement, the n=2 Lamb shift of atomic hydrogen is measured, allowing for a new determination of the charge radius of the proton. This determination is crucial to resolving the decade-old proton radius puzzle, in which it appeared that the proton radius took on a different value when measured with muons compared to measurements using electrons. The second measurement is of the n=2 triplet P fine structure of atomic helium, and this work is part of a program to obtain a new determination of the fine-structure constant. Both of these measurements use a new measurements technique: Frequency offset separated oscillatory fields. Finally, a new major effort (EDM^3) is starting at York University to measure the electron electric dipole moment using polar molecules embedded into inert-gas solids. This measurement will test for T violation and will probe physics up to the PeV energy scale.