Talks

Last May, NASA astronauts performed a challenging and flawless Space Shuttle servicing mission to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. With science instruments repaired on board and incredible new ones installed, the observatory is more powerful now than ever before. I will show the dramatic highlights of the mission, and present some of the first results from the refurbished telescope. The sensitivity and multi-wavelength capabilities are revealing the highest redshift galaxies ever seen as well as details of the cosmic web of intergalactic medium, large scale structure formation, and stellar evolution. Studies of dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanet atmospheres add to the profound contributions to astrophysics that Hubble is making, at the new apex of its capabilities.

In quantum information, entanglement has often been viewed as a resource. But in this talk, I will look at (pure bipartite) entanglement through the lens of superselection rules. The idea is that it requires quantum communication not only to create entanglement, but also to destroy it in a way that doesn't leak information to the environment. As a result, when communication is scarce, superpositions of different numbers of EPR pairs can be difficult to obtain. This constraint is not a strict superselection rule, but rather an approximate version that gives rigorous bounds on achievable fidelities. After describing the general phenomenon, I will show how it relates to communication complexity, information theory and fairy tales about princesses. This talk is based on 0803.3066, 0909.1557, 0912.5537 and other unpublished work.