Talks

It has been well-known that topological phenomena with fractional excitations, i.e., the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) will emerge when electrons move in Landau levels. In this talk, I will show FQHE can emergy even in the absence of Landau levels in interacting fermion models and boson models. The non-interacting part of our Hamiltonian contains topologically nontrivial flat band.

The parity invariance of spinfoam gravity is an open question. Naively, parity breaking should reside in the sign of the Immirzi parameter. I show that the new Lorentzian vertex formula is in fact independent of this sign, suggesting that the dynamics is parity-invariant. The situation with boundary states and operators is more complicated. I discuss parity-related pieces of the transition amplitude and graviton propagator in the large-spin 4-simplex limit. Numerical results indicate patterns similar to those in the Euclidean case. In particular, parity-related components of the graviton propagator differ by a phase. I discuss possible resolutions of this issue.

Ideas about information are pervasive, yet the fundamental nature and structure of information - if indeed it has one! - remains elusive. Work done from many different perspectives, including those of physics, biology, logic, computer science, statistics, and game and decision theory, has yielded insights into various aspects of information. Could there be a comprehensive, unified theory? We shall chart a particular path, focusing on the idea of *information flow*, and show how common mathematical structures arise in the description of information flow in computer science, logic and quantum information.

Correlations in quantum states are sometimes inaccessible if only restricted types of quantum measurements can be performed, an effect known as quantum data hiding. For example highly entangled states shared by two parties might appear uncorrelated if the parties can only measure locally their shares of the state and communicate classically with each other. In this talk I will first discuss how a better understanding of the peculiar type of correlations found in quantum data hiding states is useful in addressing two challenges of quantum information theory: the design of efficient algorithms for determining if a quantum state is entangled, and the establishment of area laws in gapped local Hamiltonians. Second, I will present new efficient ways of generating data hiding, e.g. employing random local quantum circuits, and will briefly discuss the relevance of this approach to the problem of proving quick equilibration of quantum systems unitarily interacting with a large environment.