Physics

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.

A central question in quantum computation is to identify which problems can be solved faster on a quantum computer. A Holy Grail of the field would be to have a theory of quantum speed-ups that delineates the physical mechanisms sustaining quantum speed-ups and helps in the design of new quantum algorithms. In this talk, we present such a toy theory for the study of a class of quantum algorithms for algebraic problems, including Shor’s celebrated factoring algorithm. Our theory is an extension of Gottesman’s stabilizer formalism based on elements of group and hypergroup theory. Using our methods, we develop classical simulation algorithms for Clifford-like circuits containing quantum Fourier transforms as well as new quantum algorithms for hidden symmetries and hyper-symmertry problems. During the talk, we will discuss the role of resources such as entanglement, interference and contextuality within our formalism and connect quantum speed-ups therein to the presence of precise algebraic structures.

Based on the following works:

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3637
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3208
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.4800
[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05806

Tensor networks offer an efficient representation of many-body wave-functions in an exponentially large Hilbert space by exploiting the area law of ground state quantum entanglement. I will start with a gentle introduction to the tensor network formalism. Then I will describe its application to realizing Wilson's renormalization group directly on quantum lattice models (e.g. quantum spin chains), with emphasis on the RG fixed points corresponding to conformal field theories. We will see how to define both global and local scale transformations on the lattice in such a way that, intriguingly, conformal invariance can be tested (and conformal data extracted) right at the UV cut-off scale.