Talks

I'll describe a connection between uncertainty relations, information locking and low-distortion embeddings of L2 into L1. Exploiting this connection leads to the first explicit construction of entropic uncertainty relations for a number of measurements that is polylogarithmic in the dimension d while achieving an average measurement entropy of (1-e) log d for arbitrarily small e. From there, it is straightforward to obtain the first strong information locking scheme that is efficiently computable using a quantum computer. This locking scheme can be interpreted as a method for encrypting classical messages using a key of size much smaller than the message length. Other applications include efficient encodings for amortized quantum identification over classical channels and new string commitment protocols.

The average quantum physicist on the street believes that a quantum-mechanical Hamiltonian must be Dirac Hermitian (invariant under combined matrix transposition and complex conjugation) in order to guarantee that the energy eigenvalues are real and that time evolution is unitary. However, the Hamiltonian $H=p^2+ix^3$, which is obviously not Dirac Hermitian, has a real positive discrete spectrum and generates unitary time evolution, and thus it defines a fully consistent and physical quantum theory. Evidently, the axiom of Dirac Hermiticity is too restrictive. While $H=p^2+ix^3$ is not Dirac Hermitian, it is PT symmetric; that is, invariant under combined space reflection P and time reversal T. The quantum mechanics defined by a PT-symmetric Hamiltonian is a complex generalization of ordinary quantum mechanics. When quantum mechanics is extended into the complex domain, new kinds of theories having strange and remarkable properties emerge. Some of these properties have recently been verified in laboratory experiments. If one generalizes classical mechanics into the complex domain, the resulting theories have equally remarkable properties.

The second law of thermodynamics tells that physics imposes a fundamental constraint on the efficiency of all thermal machines. Here I will address the question of whether size imposes further constraints upon thermal machines, namely whether there is a minimum size below which no machine can run, and whether when they are small if they can still be efficient? I will present a simple model which shows that there is no size limitation and no limit on the efficiency of thermal machine and that this leads to a unified view of small refrigerators, pumps and engines.

We discuss the coupling of fermions to holographic superconductors in 3+1 and 4+1 (bulk) dimensions. We do so from a top-down perspective, by considering the reduction of the fermionic sector in recently found consistent truncations of type IIB and D=11 supergravity on squashed Sasaki-Einstein manifolds, which notably retain a finite number of charged (massive) modes. The truncations in question also include the string/M-theory embeddings of various models which have been proposed to describe systems with non-relativistic scale invariance via holography. We show that the lower-dimensional effective action for the fermion modes includes certain interactions that had been discussed in bottom-up constructions, as well as a variety of new couplings that may be relevant for applications of holographic techniques to the study of condensed matter systems