Talks

Populations often adapt to spatially heterogeneous environments via substitutions or allele frequency changes at many loci spread across the genome. Subsequent contact between diverged populations can produce unfit hybrids, which inhibits genetic exchange across the genome, thus setting the stage for further divergence and speciation. How such polygenic divergence builds up or is maintained depends on the coupled dynamics of multiple loci under selection, making it challenging to predict. In this talk, I will outline simple theoretical approximations based on effective migration rates that capture how coupling or linkage disequilibria (LD) between loci influences the maintenance of polygenic adaptive divergence. This analysis allow us to clarify how genetic architecture (i.e., the numbers, selective and dominance effects and linkage relationships of selected variants) influences divergence in the face of gene flow and genetic drift. I will conclude my talk with a broader perspective on...

In a simple, constant environment does evolution continue forever? Does extensive diversification via small genetic and ecological differences? What are general evolutionary consequences of organismic complexity? Hints from long term laboratory evolution experiments and from genomic data of within-species bacterial diversity motivate considering these questions. Several simple models of evolution with small ecological feedback will be introduced, with the high dimensionality of phenotype space enabling mathematical analysis.

A Bell scenario can be conceptualized as a "communication" scenario with zero rounds of communication between parties, i.e., although each party can receive a system from its environment on which it can implement a measurement, it cannot send out any system to another party. Under this constraint, there is a strict hierarchy of correlation sets, namely, classical, quantum, and non-signalling. However, without any constraints on the number of communication rounds between the parties, they can realize arbitrary correlations by exchanging only classical systems. We consider a multipartite scenario where the parties can engage in at most a single round of communication, i.e., each party is allowed to receive a system once, implement any local intervention on it, and send out the resulting system once. Taking our cue from Bell nonlocality in the "zero rounds" scenario, we propose a notion of nonclassicality---termed antinomicity---for correlations in scenarios with a single round of communication. Similar to the zero rounds case, we establish a strict hierarchy of correlation sets classified by their antinomicity in single-round communication scenarios. Since we do not assume a global causal order between the parties, antinomicity serves as a notion of nonclassicality in the presence of indefinite causal order (as witnessed by causal inequality violations). A key contribution of this work is an explicit antinomicity witness that goes beyond causal inequalities, inspired by a modification of the Guess Your Neighbour's Input (GYNI) game that we term the Guess Your Neighbour's Input or NOT (GYNIN) game. Time permitting, I will speculate on why antinomicity is a strong notion of nonclassicality by interpreting it as an example of fine-tuning in classical models of indefinite causality.This is based on joint work with Ognyan Oreshkov, arXiv:2307.02565.

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Quantum measurement has conventionally been regarded as the final step in quantum information processing, which is essential for reading out the processed information but collapses the quantum state into a classical state. However, recent studies have shown that quantum measurement itself can induce novel quantum phenomena. One seminal example is a monitored random circuit, which can generate long-range entanglement faster than a random unitary circuit. Inspired by these results, in this talk, we address the following question: When quantum information is encoded in a quantum error-correcting code, how many physical qubits should be randomly measured to destroy the encoded information? We investigate this question for various quantum error-correcting codes and derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for destroying the information through measurements. In particular, we demonstrate that for a large class of quantum error-correcting codes, it is impossible to destroy the encoded information through random single-qubit Pauli measurements when a tiny portion of physical qubits is still unmeasured. Our results not only reveal the extraordinary robustness of quantum codes under measurement decoherence, but also suggest potential applications in quantum information processing tasks.

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