Search Talks

How may we quantify the value of physical resources, such as entangled quantum states, heat baths or lasers? Existing resource theories give us partial answers; however, these rely on idealizations, like the concept of perfectly independent copies of states used to derive conversion rates. As these idealizations are impossible to implement in practice, such results may be of little consequence for experimentalists.

In this talk I introduce tools to quantify realistic descriptions of resources, applicable for example when we do not have perfect control over a physical system, when only the neighbourhood of a state or some of its properties are known, or when slight correlations cannot be ruled out.

Some resources, like entanglement, can be characterized in terms of copies of local states: we generalize this with operational ways to describe composition and copies of realistic resources, without assuming a tensor product structure.  For others, like thermodynamic work, value is seen as a real function on physical states, like the height of a weight. While value is often expected to behave linearly, that simplification excludes many real-life resources: for example, the operational value of money, in terms of what can be done with it, is hardly linear on the amount of coin, and even has catalytic aspects above certain thresholds. We characterize resources that behave linearly and those that allow for investments - in the extreme, catalytic resources.

This work is an application of the framework introduced in arXiv:1511.08818.

One implication of Bell's theorem is that there cannot in general be hidden variable models for quantum mechanics that both are noncontextual and retain the structure of a classical probability space.  Thus, some hidden variable programs aim to retain noncontextuality at the cost of using a generalization of the Kolmogorov probability axioms.  We present a theorem to show that such programs are committed to the existence of a finite null cover for some quantum mechanical experiments, i.e., a finite collection of probability zero events whose disjunction exhausts the space of possibilities.  This serves as a kind of "no-go" theorem for these alternative, or generalized, probability theories.

Categorical symplectic geometry studies an invariant of symplectic manifolds called the "Fukaya (A-infinity) category", which consists of the Lagrangian submanifolds and a symplectically-robust intersection theory of these Lagrangians.  Over the last two decades the Fukaya category has emerged as a powerful tool: for instance, it has produced inroads to Arnol'd's Nearby Lagrangians Conjecture, and it allowed Kontsevich to formulate the the Homological Mirror Symmetry conjecture.

In this talk I will describe a project, joint with Satyan Devadoss, Stefan Forcey, and Katrin Wehrheim, which attempts to relate the Fukaya categories of different symplectic manifolds via a notion of functoriality.  After mentioning some analytic results about the singular quilts necessary for this construction, I will describe the combinatorial component: with Devadoss and Forcey we are constructing a family of polytopes that specialize to the associahedra in two different ways, and can be thought of as the 2-categorical version of associahedra.

Generation of accurate mock observations tailored specifically to upcoming surveys such as Advanced ACT, CHIME, and LSST is a key technical challenge in cosmology. Traditional approaches involving N-body simulation are fraught with difficulties due to increasingly large survey volumes and depths. Typically, statistical ensembles can only be realized for a few carefully-chosen parameters, limiting exploration to a significantly restricted cosmological model space. We have developed a new massively parallel algorithm to generate accurate halo masses and positions in a fraction (~1e-3 to 1e-2) of the time taken by N-body simulations. I will present a suite of simulated full sky cluster Sunyaev-Zel’dovich maps that have been produced with this approach, and describe the types of virtual large scale structure observations that are now within reach in the coming years.