Talks

I will discuss what we know about creating randomness within physics. Although quantum theory prescribes completely random outcomes to particular processes, could it be that within a yet-to-be-discovered post-quantum theory these outcomes are predictable? We have recently shown that this is not possible, using a very natural assumption. In the present talk, I will discuss some recent progress towards relaxing this assumption, providing arguably the strongest evidence yet for truly random processes in our world.

In recent years, a number of observations have highlighted anomalies that might be explained by invoking dark matter annihilation. The excess of high energy positrons in cosmic rays reported by the PAMELA experiment is only one of the most prominent examples of such anomalies. Models where dark matter annihilates offer an attractive possibility to explain these observations, provided that the annihilation rate is enhanced over the typical values given by conventional models of thermal relic dark matter annihilation. An elegant proposal to achieve this, is that of a Sommerfeld mechanism produced by a mutual interaction between the dark matter particles prior to their annihilation. However, this enhancement can not be arbitrarily large without violating a number of astrophysical measurements. In this talk, I will discuss the degree to which these measurements can constrain Sommerfeld-enhanced models. In particular, I will talk about constraints coming from the actual abundance of dark matter and the extragalactic background light measured at multiple wavelengths.

Much of the recent progress in understanding quantum theory has been achieved within an operational approach. Within this context quantum mechanics is viewed as a theory for making probabilistic predictions for measurement outcomes following specified preparations. However, thus far some of the essential elements of the theory – space, time and causal structure – elude such an operational formulation and are assumed to be fixed. Is it possible to extend the operational approach to quantum mechanics such that the notions of an underlying spacetime or causal structure are not assumed? What new phenomenology can follow from such an approach? We develop a framework for multipartite quantum correlations that does not presume these notions, but simply that experimenters in their local laboratories are free to perform arbitrary quantum operations. All known situations that respect definite causal order, including signalling and no-signalling correlations between space-like and time-like separated experiments, as well as probabilistic mixtures of these, can be expressed in this framework. Remarkably, we find quantum correlations which are neither causally ordered nor in a probabilistic mixture of definite causal orders. These correlations are shown to enable performing a communication task that is impossible if a fixed background time is assumed and the events are sufficiently localized in the time.

Over the last 10 years there has been an explosion of “operational reconstructions” of quantum theory. This is great stuff: For, through it, we come to see the myriad ways in which the quantum formalism can be chopped into primitives and, through clever toil, brought back together to form a smooth whole. An image of an IQ-Block puzzle comes to mind, http://www.prismenfernglas.de/iqblock_e.htm. There is no doubt that this is invaluable work, particularly for our understanding of the intricate connections between so many quantum information protocols. But to me, it seems to miss the mark for an ultimate understanding of quantum theory; I am left hungry. I still want to know what strange property of matter forces this formalism upon our information accounting. To play on something Einstein once wrote to Max Born, “The quantum reconstructions are certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that they are not yet the real thing. The reconstructions say a lot, but do not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'old one’." In this talk, I hope to expand on these points and convey some sense of why I am fascinated with the problem of the symmetric informationally complete POVMs to an extent greater than axiomatic reconstructions.

This talk reviews recent and on-going work, much of it joint with Howard Barnum, on the origins of the Jordan-algebraic structure of finite-dimensional quantum theory. I begin by describing a simple recipe for constructing highly symmetrical probabilistic models, and discuss the ordered linear spaces generated by such models. I then consider the situation of a probabilistic theory consisting of a symmetric monoidal *-category of finite-dimensional such models: in this context, the state and effect cones are self-dual. Subject to a further ``steering" axiom, they are also homogenous, and hence, by the Koecher-Vinberg Theorem, representable as the cones of formally real Jordan algebras. Finally, if the theory contains a single system with the structure of a qubit, then (by a result of H. Hanche-Olsen), each model in the category is the self-adjoint part of a C*-algebra.

What is the gravity dual of a strongly interacting state of matter at zero temperature and finite charge density? The simplest candidates are extremal black holes. The presence of charged matter in the bulk can often mean that extremal black holes are not the ground state. In this talk I will discuss the physics of a class of solutions, essentially charged neutron stars, that can be thermodynamically preferred over extremal black holes.

It is now exactly 75 years ago that John von Neumann denounced his own Hilbert space formalism: ``I would like to make a confession which may seem immoral: I do not believe absolutely in Hilbert space no more.'' (sic) [1] His reason was that Hilbert space does not elucidate in any direct manner the key quantum behaviors. One year later, together with Birkhoff, they published "The logic of quantum mechanics". However, it is fair to say that this program was never successful nor does it have anything to do with logic. So what is logic? We will conceive logic in two manners: (1) Something which captures the mathematical content of language (cf `and', `or', `no', `if ... then' are captured by Boolean algebra); (2) something that can be encoded in a `machine' and enables it to reason. Recently we have proposed a new kind of `logic of quantum mechanics' [4]. It follows Schrodinger in that the behavior of compound quantum systems, described by the tensor product [2, again 75 years ago], that captures the quantum behaviors. Over the past couple of years we have played the following game: how much quantum phenomena can be derived from `composition + epsilon'. It turned out that epsilon can be taken to be `very little', surely not involving anything like continuum, fields, vector spaces, but merely a `two-dimensional space' of temporal composition (cf `and then') and compoundness (cf `while'), together with some very natural purely operational assertion. In a very short time, this radically different approach has produced a universal graphical language for quantum theory which helped to resolve some open problems. Most importantly, it paved the way to automate quantum reasoning [5,6], and also enables to model meaning for natural languages [7,8]. That is, we are truly taking `quantum logic' now! If time permits, we also discuss how this logical view has helped to solve concrete problems in quantum information. [1] M Redei (1997) Why John von Neumann did not like the Hilbert space formalism of quantum mechanics (and what he liked instead). Stud Hist Phil Mod Phys 27, 493-510. [2] G Birkhoff and J von Neumann (1936) The logic of quantum mechanics. Annals of Mathematics 37, 823843. [3] E Schroedinger, (1935) Discussion of probability relations between separated systems. Proc Camb Phil Soc 31, 555-563; (1936) 32, 446-451. [4] B Coecke (2010) Quantum picturalism. Contemporary Physics 51, 59-83. arXiv:0908.1787 [5] L Dixon, R Duncan, A Kissinger and A Merry. http://dream.inf.ed.ac.uk/projects/quantomatic/ [6] L Dixon and R Duncan (2009) Graphical reasoning in compact closed categories for quantum computation. Annals of Mathematics and Articial Intelligence 56, 2342. [7] B Coecke, M Sadrzadeh & S Clark (2010) Linguistic Analysis 36. Mathematical foundations for a compositional distributional model of meaning. arXiv:1003.4394 [8] New scientist (11 Dec 2011) Quantum links let computers read.

Modal quantum theory (MQT) is a discrete model that is similar in structure to ordinary quantum theory, but based on a finite field instead of complex amplitudes. Its interpretation involves only the "modal" concepts of possibility and impossibility rather than quantitative probabilities. Despite its very simple structure, MQT nevertheless includes many of the key features of actual quantum physics, including entanglement and nonclassical computation. In this talk we describe MQT and explore how modal and probabilistic theories are related. Under what circumstances can we assign probabilities to a given modal structure?

Sage is a collection of mature open source software for mathematics, and new code, all unified into one powerful and easy-to-use package. The mission statement of the Sage project is: "Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab." More information is available at www.sagemath.org. I will use the Sage notebook (a web interface) to demonstrate the use of Sage for a variety of mathematical problems and comment on its design and future direction.

We propose an operationally motivated definition of the physical equivalence of states in General Probabilistic Theories and consider the principle of the physical equivalence of pure states, which turns out to be equivalent to the symmetric structure of the state space. We further consider a principle of the decomposability with distinguishable pure states and give classification theorems of the state spaces for each principle, and derive the Bloch ball in 2 and 3 dimensional systems.

Usually, quantum theory (QT) is introduced by giving a list of abstract mathematical postulates, including the Hilbert space formalism and the Born rule. Even though the result is mathematically sound and in perfect agreement with experiment, there remains the question why this formalism is a natural choice, and how QT could possibly be modified in a consistent way. My talk is on recent work with Lluis Masanes, where we show that five simple operational axioms actually determine the formalism of QT uniquely. This is based to a large extent on Lucien Hardy's seminal work. We start with the framework of "general probabilistic theories", a simple, minimal mathematical description for outcome probabilities of measurements. Then, we use group theory and convex geometry to show that the state space of a bit must be a 3D (Bloch) ball, finally recovering the Hilbert space formalism. There will also be some speculation on how to find natural post-quantum theories by dropping one of the axioms.