For the first time in human thought it is now possible to observationally determine how much matter is in the Universe as a whole. These observations strongly support the “Concordance Model” of Hot Big Bang Cosmology, and reinforce earlier indications that ordinary matter (atoms, nuclei and electrons) make up at present at most 4% of the total of the Universal energy density. The big surprise was that the rest consists of *two* kinds of unknown forms of matter: the so-called Dark Matter and Dark Energy. This talk summarizes for non-specialists the various lines of evidence for their existence, and some of the theoretical ideas which have been proposed to account for their properties
It has long been known that a metal near an instability
to antiferromagnetism also has a weak-coupling Cooper instability to
spin-singlet d-wave-like superconductivity.
However, the theory of the antiferromagnetic quantum
critical point flows to strong-coupling in two spatial dimensions, and so the
fate of the superconductivity has also been unclear.
I will describe a method to realize the generic
antiferromagnetic quantum critical in a metal in a sign-problem-free Monte
Carlo simulation. Results showing Fermi surface reconstruction and
unconventional spin-singlet superconductivity across the critical point are
obtained.
The world's most ambitious scientific experiment
is buried 100 meters underground, straddling Switzerland and France. A billion
times every minute, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) slams together protons,
while four giant detectors watch closely. - So how does the Large Hadron
Collider work? - Why can slamming tiny particles into each other provide clues
about the nature of all space and time? - What mysteries are physicists trying
to solve with data from the LHC? - How does the cutting edge of particle
physics relate to the world around us, from the patterns of stars in the sky to
the fact that they shine at all? Natalia Toro, PI Faculty, works at the
intersection of theories and hard data. She will explain how complex collision
data from the LHC is being digested and examined right now, and how it may set
the course for the science of the future.
A
crucial question in any approach to quantum information processing
is: first, how are classical bits
encoded
physically in the quantum system, second, how are they then manipulated and,
third, how are they finally read out?
These
questions are particularly challenging when investigating quantum
information processing in a relativistic spacetime. An obvious
framework for such an investigation is relativistic quantum field
theory. Here, progress is hampered by the lack of a universally
applicable rule for calculating the probabilities of the outcomes of ideal
measurements on a relativistic quantum field in a collection of spacetime
regions. Indeed,
a straightforward relativistic generalisation of the non-relativistic formula
for these probabilities leads to superluminal signalling.
Motivated
by these considerations we ask what interventions/ideal measurements can we in
principle make, taking causality as our guiding criterion. In the course
of this analysis we reconsider various aspects of ideal measurements in QFT,
detector models and the probability rules themselves. In particular, it is
shown that an ideal measurement of a one–particle wave packet state of a
relativistic quantum field in Minkowski spacetime enables superluminal
signalling. The result holds for a measurement that takes place over an
intervention region in spacetime whose extent in time in some frame is longer
than the light crossing time of the packet in that frame.
I'll describe a special information-theoretic property of
quantum field theories with holographic duals: the mutual informations among
arbitrary disjoint spatial regions A,B,C obey the inequality I(A:BC) >=
I(A:B)+I(A:C), provided entanglement entropies are given by the Ryu-Takayanagi
formula. Inequalities of this type are known as monogamy relations and are
characteristic of measures of quantum entanglement. This suggests that
correlations in holographic theories arise primarily from entanglement rather
than classical correlations. Moreover, monogamy property implies that the
Ryu-Takayanagi formula is consistent with all known general inequalities obeyed
by the entanglement entropy, including an infinite set recently discovered by
Cadney, Linden, and Winter; this constitutes significant evidence in favour of
its validity.
The fundamental properties of quantum
information and its applications to computing and cryptography have been
greatly illuminated by considering information-theoretic tasks that are
provably possible or impossible within non-relativistic quantum mechanics. In this talk I describe a general framework
for defining tasks within (special) relativistic quantum theory and illustrate
it with examples from relativistic quantum cryptography.
We present a general, analytic recipe to compute the entanglement that is generated between arbitrary, discrete modes of bosonic quantum fields by Bogoliubov transformations. Our setup allows the complete characterization of the quantum correlations in all Gaussian field states. Additionally, it holds for all Bogoliubov transformations. These are commonly applied in quantum optics for the description of squeezing operations, relate the modedecompositions of observers in different regions of curved spacetimes, and describe observers moving along non-stationary trajectories. We focus on a quantum optical example in a cavity quantum electrodynamics setting: an uncharged scalar field within a cavity provides a model for an optical resonator, in which entanglement is created by non-uniform acceleration.We show that the amount of generated entanglement can be magnified by initialsingle-mode squeezing, for which we provide an explicit formula.Applications to quantum fields in curved spacetimes, such as an expanding universe, are discussed.