Talks

This is a geometric tutorial about straight and twisted vectors and forms (ie, de Rham currents) leading to some wild thoughts about the EM field as a *thing*, ie with properties similar to a piece of matter; and to some even wilder thoughts about a metric-free GR.

Recently, emergent phenomena have started to attract more attention. Instead of assuming a symmetric world, one begins with a chaotic one. In this talk, I will describe this picture, discuss the main constraints on emergence, and then present a few phenomenological procedures that can be implemented to study the emergent phenomena.

This talk presents sufficient conditions for equilibration and thermalization of subsystems within closed many body quantum systems. That is, we identify when the local properties of the equilibrium state resemble those of a thermal state. With this aim, the recent progress in this field is reviewed and we introduce a novel perturbation technique for a realistic weak coupling between the subsystem and its environment. Unlike the standard perturbation theory, our technique is robust in the thermodynamic limit. Based on our thermalization results, we construct a simple and fully general quantum algorithm for preparing Gibbs states with a certified runtime and error bonds.

In my talk I raise the question of the fundamental limits to the size of thermal machines - refrigerators, heat pumps and work producing engines - and I will present the smallest possible ones. I will also discuss the issue of a possible complementarity between size and efficiency and show that even the smallest machines could be maximally efficient. Finally I will present a new point of view over what is work and what do thermal machines actually do.

I provide a reformulation of finite dimensional quantum theory in the circuit framework in terms of mathematical axioms, and a reconstruction of quantum theory from operational postulates. The mathematical axioms for quantum theory are the following: [Axiom 1] Operations correspond to operators. [Axiom 2] Every complete set of positive operators corresponds to a complete set of operations. The following operational postulates are shown to be equivalent to these mathematical axioms: [P1] Definiteness. Associated with any given pure state is a unique maximal effect giving probability equal to one. This maximal effect does not give probability equal to one for any other pure state. [P2] Information locality. A maximal measurement on a composite system is effected if we perform maximal measurements on each of the components. [P3] Tomographic locality. The state of a composite system can be determined from the statistics collected by making measurements on the components. [P4] Compound permutatability. There exists a compound reversible transformation on any system effecting any given permutation of any given maximal set of distinguishable states for that system. [P5] Preparability. Filters are non-mixing and non-flattening. Hence, from these postulates we can reconstruct all the usual features of quantum theory: States are represented by positive operators, transformations by completely positive trace non-increasing maps, and effects by positive operators. The Born rule (i.e. the trace rule) for calculating probabilities also follows. See arXiv:1104.2066 for more details. These operational postulates are deeper than those I gave ten years ago in quant-ph/0101012.

Quantum theory can be thought of a noncommutative generalization of classical probability and, from this perspective, it is puzzling that no quantum generalization of conditional probability is in widespread use. In this talk, I discuss one such generalization and show how it can unify the description of ensemble preparations of quantum states, POVM measurements and the description of correlations between quantum systems. The conditional states formalism allows for a description of prepare-and-measure experiments that is neutral with respect to the direction of inference, such that both the retrodictive formalism and the more usual predictive formalism are consequences of a more fundamental description in terms of a conditionally independent tripartite state, and the two formalisms are related by a quantum generalization of Bayes' rule. As an application, I give a generalized argument for the pooling rule proposed by Spekkens and Wiseman that is a direct analog of a result in classical supra-Bayesian pooling.

We will analyze different aspects of locality in causal operational probabilistic theories. We will first discuss the notion of local state and local objective information in operational probabilistic theories, and define an operational notion of discord that coincides with quantum discord in the case of quantum theory. Using such notion, we will show that the only theory in which all separable states have null discord is the classical one. We will then analyze locality of transformations, reviewing some general properties of no-signaling channels in causal theories. We will show that it is natural to define transformations on no-signaling channels that cannot be extended to all bipartite channels, and discuss the consequences of this fact on information processing.

The model of local non-Gaussianity, parameterized by the constant non-linearity parameter fNL, is an extremely popular description of non-Gaussianity. However, a mild scale-dependence of fNL is natural. This scale dependence is a new observable, potentially detectable with the Planck satellite, which helps to further discriminate between models of inflation. It is sensitive to properties of the early universe which are not probed by the standard observables. In a complementary way, the trispectrum also contains important information about non-Gaussianity which the bispectrum does not capture. We explicitly calculate the scale dependence and trispectrum in several models including one with a very large infrared-loop contribution to the bispectrum and in various realizations of the curvaton scenario.

I will discuss the construction of a holographic dictionary for theories with non-relativistic conformal symmetry, relating the field theory to the dual spacetime. I will focus on the case of Lifshitz spacetimes, giving a definition of asymptotically locally Lifshitz spacetimes and discussing the calculation of field theory observables and holographic renormalization.

We address the problem of testing the dimensionality of classical and quantum systems in a ‘black-box’ scenario. Imagine two uncharacterized devices. The first one allows an experimentalist to prepare a physical system in various ways. The second one allows the experimentalist to perform some measurement on the system. After collecting enough statistics, the experimentalist obtains a ‘data table’, featuring the probability distribution of the measurement outcomes for each choice of preparation (of the system) and of measurement. Here, we develop a general formalism to assess the minimal dimensionality of classical and quantum systems necessary to reproduce a given data table. To illustrate these ideas, we provide simple examples of classical and quantum ‘dimension witnesses’. In general quantum systems are more economical than classical ones in terms of dimensionality, in the sense that there exist data tables obtainable from quantum systems of dimension d which can only be generated from classical systems of dimension strictly greater than d. By drawing connections to communication complexity one can find data tables for which this classical/quantum separation is dramatic. Finally, these ideas can also be used to demonstrate security of one-way QKD in a semi-device-independent scenario, in which devices are uncharacterized, but only assumed to produce quantum systems of a given dimension.

A seminal work by Cleve, Høyer, Toner and Watrous (quant-ph/0404076) proposed a close connection between quantum nonlocality and computational complexity theory by considering nonlocal games and multi-prover interactive proof systems with entangled provers. It opened up the whole area of study of the computational nature of nonlocality. Since then, understanding nonlocality has been one of the major goals in computational complexity theory in the quantum setting. This talk gives a survey of this exciting area.

In this talk, I'll survey various "foils" of BQP (Bounded-Error Quantum Polynomial-Time) that have been proposed: that is, changes to the quantum model of computation that make it either more or less powerful. Possible topics include: postselected quantum computing, quantum computing with nonlinear Schrodinger equation, quantum computing with non-unitary linear transformations, quantum computing with hidden variables, linear-optical quantum computing, quantum computing with restricted gate sets, quantum computing with separable mixed states, quantum computing over finite fields, and more depending on audience interest.