Physics

In this talk, I will focus on cosmologies that replace the big bang with a big bounce. I will explain how, in these scenarios, the large-scale structure of the universe is determined during a contracting phase before the bounce and will describe the recent development of the first well-behaved classical (non-singular) cosmological bounce solutions.

In recent years there has been quite some effort to apply Matrix Product States (MPS) and more general Tensor Networks (TN) to lattice gauge theories. Contrary to the standard Euclidean-time Monte Carlo approach, which faces a major obstacle in the sign problem, numerical methods based on TN are free from the sign problem and allow to some extent simulating time evolution. Moreover, TN are also a suitable tool to explore proposals for potential future quantum simulators for lattice gauge theories.

In this talk I am going to present some examples where these possibilities allow novel insight into lattice gauge theories. After briefly introducing MPS, I will mainly focus on two models: The first part of the talk is going to be about the Schwinger model. I will show how MPS can help to explore proposals for potential future quantum simulators for this model by studying their spectral properties and simulating adiabatic preparation protocols for the interacting vacuum.

Furthermore, I will show an explicit example where TN allow to overcome the Monte Carlo sign problem in a lattice calculation by studying the zero-temperature phase structure for the two-flavor case at non-zero chemical potential with MPS.

In the second part, I am focusing on a non-Abelian gauge model, namely a 1+1 dimensional SU(2) lattice gauge theory. Using MPS, the phenomenon of string breaking in this theory can be studied in real time, thus allowing to gain new insight into this process. Moreover, I will show how the gauge field can be integrated out for systems with open boundary conditions and how to obtain a formulation which allows to address the model more efficiently with MPS.

Quantum tomography is an important tool for characterizing the parameters of unknown states, measurements, and gates.  Standard quantum tomography is the practice of estimating these parameters with known measurements, states, or both, respectively.  In recent years, it has become important to address the issue of working with systems where the ``devices'' used to prepare states and make measurements both have significant errors.  Of particular concern to me is whether such state-preparation and measurement errors are correlated with each other.  In this talk, I will share a solution to assessing such correlations with an object called a partial determinant.  Further, I will show how this technique suggests a perspective for such correlated quantum states and observables (over the space of device settings) is analogous to the non-holonomic perspectives of thermodynamic heat and work (over the macroscopic state space.)

In this talk I will give a short introduction into Projected Entangled-Pair States (PEPS), and their infinite variant iPEPS, a class of tensor network Ansatz targeted at the simulation of 2D strongly correlated systems. I will present work on two recent

projects: the first will be an application of the iPEPS algorithm to a Kitaev-Heisenberg model, a model which through-out recent years has received a lot of attention due to its potential connection to the physics of a subclass of the so-called Iridate compounds. The second will be work related to the development of the iPEPS method to specifically target cylindrical geometries. Here I will present some preliminary results where we apply the methods to the Heisenberg and Fermi-Hubbard models and evaluate their performance in comparison to infinite Matrix Product States. As a final part of my talk I will, depending on time, elaborate somewhat on potential future topics including (but not restricted to):  the main challenges of iPEPS simulations from a numerical perspective and what pre-steps we have experimented with to tackle these, the possibility of applying recent proposals for finite-temperature calculations within the PEPS framework to frustrated spin systems and the use of Tensor Network Renormalization for the study of RG flows.

To build a fully functioning quantum computer, it is necessary to encode quantum information to protect it from noise. Topological codes, such as the color code, naturally protect against local errors and represent our best hope for storing quantum information. Moreover, a quantum computer must also be capable of processing this information. Since the color code has many computationally valuable transversal logical gates, it is a promising candidate for a future quantum computer architecture.

In the talk, I will provide an overview of the color code. First, I will establish a connection between the color code and a well-studied model - the toric code. Then, I will explain how one can implement a universal gate set with the subsystem and the stabilizer color codes in three dimensions using techniques of code switching and gauge fixing. Next, I will discuss the problem of decoding the color code. Finally, I will explain how one can find the optimal error correction threshold by analyzing phase transitions in certain statistical-mechanical models.

The talk is based on http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.0069, http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02065 and recent works with M. Beverland, F. Brandao, N. Delfosse, J. Preskill and K. Svore.

In order to create ansatz wave functions for models that realize topological or symmetry protected topological phases, it is crucial to understand the entanglement properties of the ground state and how they can be incorporated into the structure of the wave function.

In this first part of this talk, I will discuss entanglement properties of models of topological crystalline insulators and spin liquids and show how to incorporate topological order, symmetry fractionalization, and lattice symmetry protected topological order into tensor network wave functions.

In the second part of this talk, I will discuss intrinsically fermionic topological phases and an exactly solvable model we built to elucidate the structure of the ground state wave functions in these phases.

References:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.00348

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06125

I will answer the question in the title. I will also describe a new quantum algorithm for Boolean formula evaluation and an improved analysis of an existing quantum algorithm for st-connectivity. Joint work with Stacey Jeffery. 

Imagine going beyond treating the symptoms of disease and instead stopping it and reversing it. This is the promise of regenerative medicine.

In her Perimeter Institute public lecture, Prof. Molly Shoichet will tell three compelling stories that are relevant to cancer, blindness and stroke. In each story, the underlying innovation in chemistry, engineering, and biology will be highlighted with the opportunities that lay ahead. 

To make it personal, Shoichet’s lab has figured out how to grow cells in an environment that mimics that of the native environment. Now she has the opportunity to grow a patient’s cancer cells in the lab and figure out which drugs will be most effective for that individual. 

In blindness, the cells at the back of the eye often die. We can slow the progression of disease but we cannot stop it because there is no way to replace those cells. With a newly engineered biomaterial, Shoichet’s lab can now transplant cells to the back of the eye and achieve some functional repair. 

The holy grail of regenerative medicine is stimulation of the stem cells resident in us. The challenge is to figure out how to stimulate those cells to promote repair. Using a drug-infused “band-aid” applied directly on the brain, Shoichet’s team achieved tissue repair. 

These three stories underline the opportunity of collaborative, multi-disciplinary research. It is exciting to think what we will discover as this research continues to unfold.

 Non-Fermi liquids are exotic metallic states which do not support well defined quasiparticles. Due to strong quantum fluctuations and the presence of extensive gapless modes near the Fermi surface, it has been difficult to understand universal low energy properties of non-Fermi liquids reliably.  In this talk, we will discuss recent progress made on field theories for non-Fermi liquids. Based on a dimensional regularization scheme which tunes the number of co-dimensions of Fermi surface, critical exponents that control scaling behaviors of physical observables can be computed in controlled ways. The systematic expansion also provides important insight into strongly interacting metals. This allows us find the non-perturbative solution for the strange metal realized at the antiferromagnetic quantum critical point in 2+1 dimensions and predict the exact critical exponents.

In recent years, precise cosmological measurements have provided strong evidence for new physics beyond the Standard Model, occurring both in the very early universe and also today.  In the near future, large-scale galaxy surveys will open another window on many different areas of physics, including tests of gravity, probes of dark energy, and cosmic inflation.  However, interpreting galaxy surveys presents new challenges, because galaxies are sensitive to astrophysics that are unimportant for the cosmic microwave background.  I will discuss how galaxies may be used to study cosmology, and will argue that the messy astrophysics in galaxies actually offers entirely new probes of fundamental physics.  I will illustrate this with 3 examples, related to inflation, neutrino masses, and the properties of dark matter.

I will argue that the standard model contains a rather strong hint that -- instead of being simply an ordinary continuous 4D manifold -- spacetime is actually the product of a 4D manifold and a certain discrete/finite 6D space (i.e. there are 6D discrete/finite "extra dimensions").  I will introduce this idea and the evidence for it in simple way, and then discuss various outstanding puzzles and future directions.

Information theory establishes the fundamental limits on data transmission, storage, and processing. Quantum information theory unites information theoretic ideas with an accurate quantum-mechanical description of reality to give a more accurate and complete theory with new and more powerful possibilities for information processing. The goal of both classical and quantum information theory is to quantify the optimal rates of interconversion of different resources. These rates are usually characterized in terms of entropies. However, nonadditivity of many entropic formulas often makes finding answers to information theoretic questions intractable. In a few auspicious cases, such as the classical capacity of a classical channel, the capacity region of a multiple access channel and the entanglement assisted capacity of a quantum channel, additivity allows a full characterization of optimal rates. Here we present a new mathematical property of entropic formulas, uniform additivity, that is both easily evaluated and rich enough to capture all known quantum additive formulas. We give a complete characterization of uniformly additive functions using the linear programming approach to entropy inequalities. In addition to all known quantum formulas, we find a new and intriguing additive quantity: the completely coherent information. We also uncover a remarkable coincidence---the classical and quantum uniformly additive functions are identical; the tractable answers in classical and quantum information theory are formally equivalent.