Scientific Series

With a cosmic flight simulator, we'll take a scenic journey through space and time. After exploring our local Galactic neighborhood, we'll travel back 13.7 billion years to explore the Big Bang itself and how state-of-the-art measurements are transforming our understanding of our cosmic origin and ultimate fate. We then turn to the question of whether this can all be described purely mathematically, and discuss implications ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters and initial conditions to broader issues like parallel universes, simulations and and Goedel incompleteness.

Cosmology ultimately aims to explain the initial conditions at the beginning of time and the entire subsequent evolution of the universe. The "beginning of time" can be understood in the Wheeler-DeWitt approach to quantum gravity, where homogeneous universes are described by a Schroedinger equation with a potential barrier. Quantum tunneling through the barrier is interpreted as a spontaneous creation of a small (Planck-size) closed universe, which then enters the regime of cosmological inflation and reaches an extremely large size. After sufficient growth, the universe can be adequately described as a classical spacetime with quantum matter. The initial quantum state of matter in the created universe can be determined by solving the Schroedinger equation with appropriate boundary conditions. I show that the most likely initial state is close to the vacuum state. This is the initial condition for inflation favored both by observational data and theoretical considerations.

Understanding magnetic reconnection is one of the major challenges of plasma physics. It plays an essential role in a wide range of physical systems such as stellar flares, accretion disks, active galactic nuclei, astrophysical dynamos and closer to home, intense magnetic energy releases in the Earth's magnetosphere. It is a phenomena which can be created in the laboratory. Magnetic reconnection occurs when oppositely directed components of field lines are broken and re-connected resulting in destruction of magnetic flux and topological rearrangement of magnetic field lines on very small scales. This can induce the release of magnetic energy on large scales resulting in high speed flows, heating and energetic particle production. There is a strong connection between formation of singular structures in flows and magnetic reconnection which I will discuss and tie this into some of the laboratory and natural physical systems under recent study. In addition to giving a contemporary overview on this subject I will discuss some open questions.

We consider N=2 supersymmetric quantum electrodynamics (SQED) with 2 flavors, the Fayet--Iliopoulos parameter, and a mass term $beta$ which breaks the extended supersymmetry down to N=1. The bulk theory has two vacua; at $beta=0$ the BPS-saturated domain wall interpolating between them has a moduli space parameterized by a U(1) phase $sigma$ which can be promoted to a scalar field in the effective low-energy theory on the wall world-volume. At small nonvanishing $beta$ this field gets a sine-Gordon potential. As a result, only two discrete degenerate BPS domain walls survive. We find an explicit solitonic solution for domain lines -- string-like objects living on the surface of the domain wall which separate wall I from wall II. The domain line is seen as a BPS kink in the world-volume effective theory. The domain line carries the magnetic flux which is exactly 1/2 of the flux carried by the flux tube living in the bulk on each side of the wall. Thus, the domain lines on the wall confine charges living on the wall, resembling Polyakov's three-dimensional confinement.

If a large quantum computer (QC) existed today, what type of physical problems could we efficiently simulate on it that we could not simulate on a conventional computer? In this talk, I argue that a QC could solve some relevant physical "questions" more efficiently. First, I will focus on the quantum simulation of quantum systems satisfying different particle statistics (e.g., anyons), using a QC made of two-level physical systems or qubits. The existence of one-to-one mappings between different algebras of observables or between different Hilbert spaces allow us to represent and imitate any physical system by any other one (e.g., a bosonic system by a spin-1/2 system). We explain how these mappings can be performed showing quantum networks useful for the efficient evaluation of some physical properties, such as correlation functions and energy spectra. Second, I will focus on the quantum simulation of classical systems. Interestingly, the thermodynamic properties of any d-dimensional classical system can be obtained by studying the zero-temperature properties of an associated d-dimensional quantum system. This classical-quantum correspondence allows us to understand classical annealing procedures as slow (adiabatic) evolutions of the lowest-energy state of the corresponding quantum system. Since many of these problems are NP-hard and therefore difficult to solve, is worth investigating if a QC would be a better device to find the corresponding solutions.

The mathematical formalism of quantum theory has many features whose physical origin remains obscure. In this paper, we attempt to systematically investigate the possibility that the concept of information may play a key role in understanding some of these features. We formulate a set of assumptions, based on generalizations of experimental facts that are representative of quantum phenomena and physically comprehensible theoretical ideas and principles, and show that it is possible to deduce the finite-dimensional quantum formalism from these assumptions. The concept of information, via an information-theoretic invariance principle, plays a central role in the derivation, and gives rise to some of the central structural features of the quantum formalism.

A multi-partite entanglement measure is constructed via the distance or angle of the pure state to its nearest unentangled state. The extention to mixed states is made via the convex-hull construction, as is done in the case of entanglement of formation. This geometric measure is shown to be a monotone. It can be calculated for various states, including arbitrary two-qubit states, generalized Werner and isotropic states in bi-partite systems. It is also calculated for various multi-partite pure and mixed states, including ground states of some physical models and states generated from quantum alogrithms, such as Grover's. A specific application to a spin model with quantum phase transistions will be presented in detail.The connection of the geometric measure to other entanglement properties will also be discussed.

If spacetime is "quantized" (discrete), then any equation of motion compatible with the Lorentz transformations is necessarily non-local. I will present evidence that this sort of nonlocality survives on length scales much greater than Planckian, yielding for example a nonlocal effective wave-equation for a scalar field propagating on an underlying causal set. Nonlocality of our effective field theories may thus provide a characteristic signature of quantum gravity.

I begin with a brief description of the black strings in backgrounds with compact circle, the Gregory-Laflamme instability and the resulting phase transition, and the critical dimensions.Then I describe a Landau-Ginzburg thermodynamic perspective on the instability and on the order of the phase transition. Next, the approach is generalized from a circle compactification to an arbitrary torus compactification. It is shown that the transition order depends only on the number of extended dimensions. I end up with outlining several open questions and puzzles related to the outcome of the Gregory-Laflamme instability.

Kolmogorov complexity is a measure of the information contained in a binary string. We investigate the notion of quantum Kolmogorov complexity, a measure of the information required to describe a quantum state. We show that for any definition of quantum Kolmogorov complexity measuring the number of classical bits required to describe a pure quantum state, there exists a pure n-qubit state which requires exponentially many bits of description. This is shown by relating the classical communication complexity to the quantum Kolmogorov complexity. Furthermore we give some examples of how quantum Kolmogorov complexity can be applied to prove results in different fields, such as quantum computation and communication.

A full analysis of QCD, the fundamental theory of subnuclear structure and interactions, relies upon numerical simulations and the lattice approximation. After being stalled for almost 30 years, recent breakthroughs in lattice QCD allow us for the first time to analyze the low-energy structure of QCD nonperturbatively with few-percent precision. This talk will present a non-technical overview of the history leading up to these breakthroughs, and survey the wide array of applications that have been enabled by them. It will focus in particular on the impact of these new techniques on experiments that explore such areas as heavy-quark and Standard Model physics.