Format results
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The Minimal Modal Interpretation of Quantum Theory
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David Kagan University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
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Jacob Barandes Harvard University
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Non local weak measurements
Aharon Brodutch Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC)
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Fault-tolerant logical gates in quantum error-correcting codes
Beni Yoshida Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
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Algebraic characterization of entanglement classes
Markus Grassl Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light
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An invariant of topologically ordered states under local unitary transformations
Jeongwan Haah Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Department of Physics
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Space-Time Circuit-to-Hamiltonian construction and Its Applications
Barbara Terhal Delft University of Technology
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Inferring causal structure: a quantum advantage
Katja Ried Universität Innsbruck
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Strong majorization entropic uncentainty relations
Karol Zyczkowski Jagiellonian University
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Quantum technologies as tools to deepen our understanding of quantum theory and relativity
Ivette Fuentes University of Southampton
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Equivalence of wave-particle duality to entropic uncertaintyEquivalence of wave-particle duality to entropic uncertainty
Patrick Coles Carnegie Mellon University
Interferometers capture a basic mystery of quantum mechanics: a single particle can exhibit wave behavior, yet that wave behavior disappears when one tries to determine the particle's path inside the interferometer. This idea has been formulated quantitatively as an inequality, e.g., by Englert and Jaeger, Shimony, and Vaidman, which upper bounds the sum of the interference visibility and the path distinguishability. Such wave-particle duality relations (WPDRs) are often thought to be conceptually inequivalent to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, although this has been debated. Here we show that WPDRs correspond precisely to a modern formulation of the uncertainty principle in terms of entropies, namely the min- and max-entropies. This observation unifies two fundamental concepts in quantum mechanics. Furthermore, it leads to a robust framework for deriving novel WPDRs by applying entropic uncertainty relations to interferometric models (arXiv reference: 1403.4687).
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Decoherence tests without quantum theory
In quantum theory, people have thought for some while about the problem of how to estimate the decoherence of a quantum channel from classical data gained in measurements. Applications of these developments include security criteria for quantum key distribution and tests of decoherence models. In this talk, I will present some ideas for how to interpret the same classical data to make statements about decoherence in cases where nature is not necessarily described by quantum theory. This is work in progress in collaboration with many people. -
Disturbance in weak measurements and the difference between quantum and classical weak values
The role of measurement induced disturbance in weak measurements is of central importance for the interpretation of the weak value. Uncontrolled disturbance can interfere with the postselection process and make the weak value dependent on the details of the measurement process. Here we develop the concept of a generalized weak measurement for classical and quantum mechanics. The two cases appear remarkably similar, but we point out some important differences. A priori it is not clear what the correct notion of disturbance should be in the context of weak measurements. We consider three different notions and get three different results: (1) For a `strong' definition of disturbance, we find that weak measurements are disturbing. (2) For a weaker definition we find that a general class of weak measurements are non-disturbing, but that one gets weak values which depend on the measurement process. (3) Finally, with respect to an operational definition of the `degree of disturbance', we find that the AAV weak measurements are the least disturbing, but that the disturbance is still non-zero. -
The Minimal Modal Interpretation of Quantum Theory
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David Kagan University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
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Jacob Barandes Harvard University
A persistent mystery of quantum theory is whether it admits an interpretation that is realist, self-consistent, model-independent, and unextravagant in the sense of featuring neither multiple worlds nor pilot waves. In this talk, I will present a new interpretation of quantum theory -- called the minimal modal interpretation (MMI) -- that aims to meet these conditions while also hewing closely to the basic structure of the theory in its widely accepted form. The MMI asserts that quantum systems -- whether closed or open -- have actual states that evolve along kinematical trajectories through their state spaces, and that those trajectories are governed by specific (if approximate) dynamical rules determined by a general new class of conditional probabilities, and in a manner that differs significantly from the de Broglie-Bohm formulation. The MMI is axiomatically parsimonious, leaves the usual dynamical content of quantum theory essentially intact, and includes only metaphysical entities that are either already a standard part of quantum theory or that have counterparts in classical physics. I will also address a number of important issues and implicit assumptions in the foundations community that I believe merit reconsideration and re-evaluation going forward. -
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Non local weak measurements
Aharon Brodutch Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC)
Weak measurement is increasingly acknowledged as an important theoretical and experimental tool. Weak values- the results of weak measurements- are often used to understand seemingly paradoxical quantum behavior. Until now however, it was not known how to perform a weak non-local measurement of a general operator. Such a procedure is necessary if we are to take the associated `weak values' seriously as a physical quantity. We propose a novel scheme for performing non-local weak measurement which is based on the principle of quantum erasure. This method can be used for a large class of observables including those related to Hardy's paradox. -
Fault-tolerant logical gates in quantum error-correcting codes
Beni Yoshida Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
Recently, Bravyi and Koenig have shown that there is a tradeoff between fault-tolerantly implementable logical gates and geometric locality of stabilizer codes. They consider locality-preserving operations which are implemented by a constant depth geometrically local circuit and are thus fault-tolerant by construction. In particular, they shown that, for local stabilizer codes in D spatial dimensions, locality preserving gates are restricted to a set of unitary gates known as the D-th level of the Clifford hierarchy. In this paper, we elaborate this idea and provide several extensions and applications of their characterization in various directions. First, we present a new no-go theorem for self-correcting quantum memory. Namely, we prove that a three-dimensional stabilizer Hamiltonian with a locality-preserving implementation of a non-Clifford gate cannot have a macroscopic energy barrier. Second, we prove that the code distance of a D-dimensional local stabilizer code with non-trivial locality-preserving m-th level Clifford logical gate is upper bounded by L^{D+1-m}. For codes with non-Clifford gates (m>2), this improves the previous best bound by Bravyi and Terhal. Third we prove that a qubit loss threshold of codes with non-trivial transversal m-th level Clifford logical gate is upper bounded by 1/m. As such, no family of fault-tolerant codes with transversal gates in increasing level of the Clifford hierarchy may exist. This result applies to arbitrary stabilizer and subsystem codes, and is not restricted to geometrically-local codes. Fourth we extend the result of Bravyi and Koenig to subsystem codes. A technical difficulty is that, unlike stabilizer codes, the so-called union lemma does not apply to subsystem codes. This problem is avoided by assuming the presence of error threshold in a subsystem code, and the same conclusion as Bravyi-Koenig is recovered. This is a joint work with Fernando Pastawski. arXiv:1408.1720 -
Algebraic characterization of entanglement classes
Markus Grassl Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light
Entanglement is a key feature of composite quantum system which is directly related to the potential power of quantum computers. In most computational models, it is assumed that local operations are relatively easy to implement. Therefore, quantum states that are related by local operations form a single entanglement class. In the case of local unitary operations, a finite set of polynomial invariants provides a complete characterization of the entanglement classes. Unfortunately, one faces the problem of combinatorial explosion so that computing such a complete set of invariants becomes difficult already for quite small system. The two main problems in this context are to compute invariants and to decide completeness, i.e., whether a given set of invariants generates the full invariant ring. Important tools are both univariate and multivariate Hilbert series which are already difficult to compute. We will also address computational aspects of these problems and techniques for showing completeness of a set of invariants. -
An invariant of topologically ordered states under local unitary transformations
Jeongwan Haah Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Department of Physics
For an anyon model in two spatial dimensions described by a modular tensor category, the topological S-matrix encodes the mutual braiding statistics, the quantum dimensions, and the fusion rules of anyons. It is nontrivial whether one can compute the topological S-matrix from a single ground state wave function. In this talk, I will show that, for a class of Hamiltonians, it is possible to define the S-matrix regardless of the degeneracy of the ground state. The definition manifests invariance of the S-matrix under local unitary transformations (quantum circuits). The defined S-matrix depends only on the ground state, in the sense that it can be computed by any Hamiltonian in the class of which the state is a ground state. This property, together with the local unitary invariance implies that any quantum circuit that connects two ground states of distinct topological S-matrices must have depth that is at least linear in the diameter of the system. A higher dimensional analog is straightforward. [arXiv:1407.2926] -
Space-Time Circuit-to-Hamiltonian construction and Its Applications
Barbara Terhal Delft University of Technology
The circuit-to-Hamiltonian construction translates a dynamics (a quantum circuit and its output) into statics (the groundstate of a circuit Hamiltonian) by explicitly defining a quantum register for a clock. The standard Feynman-Kitaev construction uses one global clock for all qubits while we consider a different construction in which a clock is assigned to each point in space where a qubit of the quantum circuit resides. We show how one can apply this construction to one-dimensional quantum circuits for which the circuit Hamiltonian realizes the dynamics of a vibrating string. We discuss how the construction can be used (1) in quantum complexity theory to obtain new and stronger results in QMA and (2) how one can realize, based on this construction, universal quantum adiabatic computation and a universal quantum walk using a 2D interacting particle Hamiltonian. See http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.6101 -
Inferring causal structure: a quantum advantage
Katja Ried Universität Innsbruck
A fundamental question in trying to understand the world -- be it classical or quantum -- is why things happen. We seek a causal account of events, and merely noting correlations between them does not provide a satisfactory answer. Classical statistics provides a better alternative: the framework of causal models proved itself a powerful tool for studying causal relations in a range of disciplines. We aim to adapt this formalism to allow for quantum variables and in the process discover a new perspective on how causality is different in the quantum world. Causal inference is a central task in the context of causal models: given observed statistics over a set of variables, one aims to infer how they are causally related. Yet in the seemingly simple case of just two classical variables, this is impossible (unless one makes additional assumptions). I will show how the analogous task for quantum variables can be solved. This quantum advantage is reminiscent of the advantages that quantum mechanics offers in computing and communication, and may lead to similarly rich insights. Our scheme is corroborated by data obtained in collaboration with Kevin Resch's experimental group. Time permitting, I will also address other applications of the quantum causal models. arXiv:1406.5036 -
Strong majorization entropic uncentainty relations
Karol Zyczkowski Jagiellonian University
We analyze entropic uncertainty relations in a finite dimensional Hilbert space and derive several strong bounds for the sum of two entropies obtained in projective measurements with respect to any two orthogonal bases. We improve the recent bounds by Coles and Piani, which are known to be stronger than the well known result of Maassen and Uffink. Furthermore, we find a novel bound based on majorization techniques, which also happens to be stronger than the recent results involving largest singular values of submatrices of the unitary matrix connecting both bases. The first set of new bounds give better results for unitary matrices close to the Fourier matrix, while the second one provides a significant improvement in the opposite sectors. Some results derived admit generalization to arbitrary mixed states, so that corresponding bounds are increased by the von Neumann entropy of the measured state. The majorization approach is finally extended to the case of several measurements. -
Quantum technologies as tools to deepen our understanding of quantum theory and relativity
Ivette Fuentes University of Southampton
Quantum information and quantum metrology can be used to study gravitational effects such as gravitational waves and the universality of the equivalence principle. On one hand, the possibility of carrying out experiments to probe gravity using quantum systems opens an avenue to deepen our understanding of the overlap of these theories. On the other hand, incorporating relativity in quantum technologies promises the development of a new generation of relativistic quantum applications of relevance in Earth-based and space-based setups. In this talk, I will introduce a framework for the application of quantum information and quantum metrology techniques to relativistic quantum fields. I will show how, using this framework, we have been able to develop an accelerometer and a gravitational wave detector which exploit both quantum and relativistic effects. Moreover, our framework can be used to estimate with high precision spacetime parameters such as the Earth's Schwarzchild radius and the gravitational constant.