Quantum Physics

Basic epistemological considerations suggest that the laws of nature should be scale invariant and no fundamental length scale should exist in nature. Indeed, the standard model action contains only two terms that break scale invariance: the Einstein-Hilbert term and the Higgs mass term. We give a simple introduction to Weyl's 1918 scale invariant gravity based on basic epistemology and discuss the three main objections put forth by Einstein: 1) the hydrogen spectrum depends on their previous history of the atom (something which is empirically ruled out to a high precision), 2) there is no account for proper time in Weyl's theory, and 3) fieldequations are 4th order leading to Ostrogradsky-type instabilities. We show that the first two objections can readily be answered. In particular the second objection is answered by developing a physical model of an ideal clock from which proper time is identified as the reading of the clock. We then outline an attempt to tackle the third objection by breaking foliation invariance and so introduce a preferred simultaneity. We show that Lorentz invariance can still be maintained if only the gravitational sector is sensitive to the preferred foliation. We impose the restrictions I) the new theory should contain general relativity in the limit of zero scale curvature, II) no fundamental length scales should appear, III) the field equations should be of second order.

Tamara Davis The last decade of astrophysics has shown more than ever before that cosmology can teach us about the nuts-and-bolts of basic physics. This has been driven by the discovery of the accelerating universe (dark energy) --- the theories being proposed to explain dark energy often invoke new physics such as brane-worlds arising from fledgling models of quantum-gravity. It has become evident that the large timescales and spatial-scales probed by cosmology allow us to learn about fundamental physics in a way inaccessible to any earth-bound experiment. This talk will review my work as part of the ESSENCE and SDSS supernova surveys, and the WiggleZ Baryon Acoustic Oscillation survey, to test new fundamental physics. I'll present the latest data and discuss how the cosmological constraints will be improved in the future with more data, different types of data, and improved analysis techniques.

I will review some recent advances on the line of deriving quantum field theory from pure quantum information processing. The general idea is that there is only Quantum Theory (without quantization rules), and the whole Physics---including space-time and relativity---is emergent from the processing. And, since Quantum Theory itself is made with purely informational principles, the whole Physics must be reformulated in information-theoretical terms. Here's the TOC of the talk: a) Very short review of the informational axiomatization of Quantum Theory; b) How space-time and relativistic covariance emerge from the quantum computation; c) Special relativity without space: other ideas; d) Dirac equation derived as information flow (without the need of Lorentz covariance); e) Information-theoretical meaning of inertial mass and Planck constant; f) Observable consequences (at the Planck scale?); h) What about Gravity? Three alternatives as a start for a brainstorming.

I'll describe a connection between uncertainty relations, information locking and low-distortion embeddings of L2 into L1. Exploiting this connection leads to the first explicit construction of entropic uncertainty relations for a number of measurements that is polylogarithmic in the dimension d while achieving an average measurement entropy of (1-e) log d for arbitrarily small e. From there, it is straightforward to obtain the first strong information locking scheme that is efficiently computable using a quantum computer. This locking scheme can be interpreted as a method for encrypting classical messages using a key of size much smaller than the message length. Other applications include efficient encodings for amortized quantum identification over classical channels and new string commitment protocols.

The second law of thermodynamics tells that physics imposes a fundamental constraint on the efficiency of all thermal machines. Here I will address the question of whether size imposes further constraints upon thermal machines, namely whether there is a minimum size below which no machine can run, and whether when they are small if they can still be efficient? I will present a simple model which shows that there is no size limitation and no limit on the efficiency of thermal machine and that this leads to a unified view of small refrigerators, pumps and engines.

Nonlocality is the most striking feature of quantum mechanics. It might even be considered its defining feature and understanding it may be the most important step towards understanding the whole theory. Yet for a long time it was impossible to pinpoint the reason behind the exact amount of nonlocality allowed by quantum mechanics expressed by Tsirelson bound. Recently information causality has been shown to be the principle from which this bound can be derived. However the whole set of nonlocal correlations and nonlocal information processing protocols that quantum mechanics allows is not specified by the Tsirelson bound. It remains an open question whether this whole zoo of nonlocality can be derived from information causality. In this talk I present the fields where information causality is applied together with most recent results or lack of such.

Quantum computers have emerged as the natural architecture to study the physics of strongly correlated many-body quantum systems, thus providing a major new impetus to the field of many-body quantum physics. While the method of choice for simulating classical many-body systems has long since been the ubiquitous Monte Carlo method, the formulation of a generalization of this method to the quantum regime has been impeded by the fundamental peculiarities of quantum mechanics, including, interference effects and the no-cloning theorem. We overcome those difficulties by constructing a quantum algorithm to sample from the Gibbs distribution of a quantum Hamiltonian at arbitrary temperatures, both for bosonic and fermionic systems. This is a further step in validating the quantum computer as a full quantum simulator, with a wealth of possible applications to quantum chemistry, condensed matter physics and high energy physics.

Even though the security of quantum key distribution has been rigorously proven, most practical schemes can be attacked and broken. These attacks make use of imperfections of the physical devices used for their implementation. Since current security proofs assume that the physical devices' exact and complete specification is known, they do not hold for this scenario. The goal of device-independent quantum key distribution is to show security without making any assumptions about the internal working of the devices. In this talk, I will first explain the assumptions 'traditional' security proofs make and why they are problematic. Then, I will discuss how the violation of Bell inequalities can be used to show security even when a large part of the physical devices is untrusted.

A system of spins with complicated interactions between them can have many possible configurations. Many configurations will be local minima of the energy, and to get from one local minimum to another requires changing the state of very many spins. A system like this is called a spin glass, and at low temperatures tends to get caught for very long times at a local minimum of energy, rather than reaching its true ground state. Indeed, in many cases, finding the ground state energy of a spin glass is a computationally hard problem, too hard to be solved on a classical computer or even a quantum computer in any reasonable amount of time. Which types of interactions give us computationally hard problems and spin glasses? I will survey what is known as we close in on finding the simplest complex spin systems.

Landauer's erasure principle states that there is an inherent work cost associated with all irreversible operations, like the erasure of the data stored in a system. The necessary work is determined by our uncertainty: the more we know about the system, the less it costs to erase it. Here, we analyse erasure in a general setting where our information about that system can be quantum mechanical. In this scenario, our uncertainty, measured by a conditional entropy, may become negative. We establish a general relation between quantum conditional entropies and a physical quantity, the work cost of erasure. As a consequence, we obtain a thermodynamic interpretation of negative entropies: they quantify the work that can be gained by a quantum observer erasing a system. (arXiv: 1009.1630)

We introduce a family of variational ansatz states for chains of anyons which optimally exploits the structure of the anyonic Hilbert space. This ansatz is the natural analog of the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz for spin chains. In particular, it has the same interpretation as a coarse-graining procedure and is expected to accurately describe critical systems with algebraically decaying correlations. We numerically investigate the validity of this ansatz using the anyonic golden chain and its relatives as a testbed. This demonstrates the power of entanglement renormalization in a setting with non-abelian exchange statistics, extending previous work on qudits, bosons and fermions in two dimensions. This is joint work with Ersen Bilgin.

I revisit an example of stronger-than-quantum correlations that was discovered by Ernst Specker in 1960. The example was introduced as a parable wherein an over-protective seer sets a simple prediction task to his daughter's suitors. The challenge cannot be met because the seer asks the suitors for a noncontextual assignment of values but measures a system for which the statistics are inconsistent with such an assignment. I will show how by generalizing these sorts of correlations, one is led naturally to some well-known proofs of nonlocality and contextuality, and to some new ones. Specker's parable involves a kind of complementarity that does not arise in quantum theory - three measurements that can be implemented jointly pairwise but not triplewise -- and therefore prompts the question of what sorts of foundational principles might rule out this kind of complementarity. This is joint work with Howard Wiseman and Yeong-Cherng Liang.