Scientific Series

How does thermalization in quantum systems work? Naively, the unitary time evolution prevents thermalization, but one can easily show that in general quantum systems thermalize when brought into contact with a thermal bath. In noninteracting systems, the approach to the thermal value can be either ballistic or diffusive depending on particle statistics and bath temperature.

However, many systems cannot be thermalized when placed in a bath: glasses.

I will discuss a disorderfree model of an organic electronic glass that is formed through rapid supercooling. Geometric frustration and long-range interactions cause the Arrhenius-type freezing.

Quenched disorder can also lead to glassiness, a phenomenon known as many-body localization. In this case, thermalization is prevented by the existence of extensively many local integrals of motion. I will show how to compute these integrals of motion and their properties.

I will argue that the standard model contains a rather strong hint that -- instead of being simply an ordinary continuous 4D manifold -- spacetime is actually the product of a 4D manifold and a certain discrete/finite 6D space (i.e. there are 6D discrete/finite "extra dimensions").  I will introduce this idea and the evidence for it in simple way, and then discuss various outstanding puzzles and future directions.

I will discuss the coupling of non-relativistic field theories to curved spacetime, and develop a framework for analyzing the possible structure of non-relativistic (Lifshitz) scale anomalies using a cohomological formulation of the Wess-Zumino consistency condition. I will compare between cases with or without Galilean boost symmetry, and between cases with or without an equal time foliation of spacetime. In 2+1 dimensions with a dynamical critical exponent of z=2, the absence of a foliation structure allows for an A-type anomaly in the Galilean case, but also introduces the possibility of an infinite set of B-type anomalies.

I will also derive Ward identities for flat space correlation functions in Lifshitz field theories, and develop a method for calculating Lifshitz anomaly coefficients from these correlation functions using split dimensional regularization.

The on-demand generation of bright entangled photon pairs is highly needed in quantum optics and emerging quantum information applications. However, a quantum light source combining both high fidelity and on-demand bright emission has proven elusive with current leading photon technologies. In this work we present a new bright nanoscale source of strongly entangled photon pairs generated with a position controlled nanowire quantum dot. The major breakthrough in the nanowire growth to achieve both bright photon emission and highly entangled photon pairs will be discussed [2, 3]. Recent experiments show the entanglement fidelity approaching unity, while enhancing the photon pair efficiency beyond state-of-the-art. We further demonstrate violation of the famous Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality in the traditional linear basis [4]. This is the first bright nanoscale source of entangled photon pairs capable of violating Bell`s inequalities, opening up future experiments in quantum optics and developments in quantum information applications.

For long-distance quantum communication we convert polarization entangled photons generated by a single quantum dot into time-bin entangled photons by sending them through a polarization-time-bin interface [5]. Importantly, this conversion is performed without loss of entanglement strength. Time-bin entanglement is more robust for long-distance quantum communication than polarization entanglement, since time-bin entangled photons are insensitive to thermal and mechanical disturbances in optical fibers.

References

[1]      M. A. M. Versteegh, M. E Reimer, K. D Jöns, D. Dalacu, P. J. Poole, A. Gulinatti, A. Giudice, and V. Zwiller, Nature Commun. 5, 5298 (2014).

[2]      D. Dalacu, K. Mnaymneh, J. Lapointe, X. Wu, P. J. Poole, G. Bulgarini, V. Zwiller, and M. E. Reimer, Nano Lett. 12 (11), 5919-5923 (2012).

[3]      M. E. Reimer et al., Phys. Rev. B 93, 195316 (2016).

[4]      K. D. Jöns et al., arXiv:1510.03897 (2015).

[5]      M. A. M. Versteegh, M. E. Reimer, A. A. van den Berg, G. Juska, V. Dimastrodonato, A. Gocalinska, E. Pelucchi, and V. Zwiller, Phys. Rev. A 92, 033802 (2015).

Two-dimensional materials such as graphene sheets can serve as excellent detectors for dark matter (DM) with couplings to electrons. The ionization energy of graphene is O(eV), making it sensitive to DM as light as an MeV, and the ejected electron may be detected without rescattering in the target, preserving directional information. I will describe the first experimental proposal for directional detection of MeV-GeV scale DM, which can be implemented in the PTOLEMY relic neutrino experiment and has comparable sensitivity to proposals using semiconductor targets. I will also describe some potential avenues for using gapless systems like Weyl semimetals to detect DM down to the keV limit for warm DM.

The frequency-dependent longitudinal and Hall conductivities — σ_xx and σ_xy — are dimensionless functions of ω/T in 2+1 dimensional CFTs at nonzero temperature. These functions characterize the spectrum of charged excitations of the theory and are basic experimental observables. We compute these conductivities for large N Chern-Simons theory with fermion matter. The computation is exact in the ’t Hooft coupling λ at N = ∞. We describe various physical features of the conductivity, including an explicit relation between the weight of the delta function at ω = 0 in σ_xx and the existence of infinitely many higher spin conserved currents in the theory. We also compute the conductivities perturbatively in Chern-Simons theory with scalar matter and show that the resulting functions of ω/T agree with the strong coupling fermionic result. This provides a new test of the conjectured 3d bosonization duality. In matching the Hall conductivities we resolve an outstanding puzzle by carefully treating an extra anomaly that arises in the regularization scheme used.  

In this talk we present the study of canonical gravity in finite regions for which we introduce a generalisation of the Gibbons-Hawking boundary term including the Immirzi parameter. We study the canonical formulation on a spacelike hypersuface with a boundary sphere and show how the presence of this term leads to a new type of degrees of freedom coming from the restoration of the gauge and diffeomorphism symmetry at the boundary. In the presence of a loop quantum gravity state, these boundary degrees of freedom localize along a set of punctures on the boundary sphere. We demonstrate that these degrees of freedom are effectively described by auxiliary strings with a 3-dimensional internal target space attached to each puncture. We show that the string currents represent the local frame field, that the string angular momenta represent the area flux and that the string stress tensor represents the two dimensional metric on the boundary of the region of interest. Finally, we show that the commutators of these broken diffeomorphisms charges of quantum geometry satisfy at each puncture a Virasoro algebra with central charge c = 3. This leads to a description of the boundary degrees of freedom in terms of a CFT structure with central charge proportional to the number of loop punctures. The boundary SU(2) gauge symmetry is recovered via the action of the U(1) 3 Kac-Moody generators (associated with the string current) in a way that is the exact analog of an infinite dimensional generalization of the Schwinger spin-representation.

(Based on the joint work with Laurent Freidel and Alejandro Perez arXiv:1611.03668)

Massive objects orbiting a near-extreme Kerr black hole plunge into the horizon after passing the innermost stable circular orbit, producing a potentially observable signal of gravitational radiation. The near horizon dynamics of such rapidly rotating black holes is governed by a conformal symmetry. In the talk I will show how this symmetry can be exploited to analytically compute the gravitational waves produced by a variety of orbits. I will also discuss an application to gravitational self-force and comment on the holographic interpretation of the process.

Information theory establishes the fundamental limits on data transmission, storage, and processing. Quantum information theory unites information theoretic ideas with an accurate quantum-mechanical description of reality to give a more accurate and complete theory with new and more powerful possibilities for information processing. The goal of both classical and quantum information theory is to quantify the optimal rates of interconversion of different resources. These rates are usually characterized in terms of entropies. However, nonadditivity of many entropic formulas often makes finding answers to information theoretic questions intractable. In a few auspicious cases, such as the classical capacity of a classical channel, the capacity region of a multiple access channel and the entanglement assisted capacity of a quantum channel, additivity allows a full characterization of optimal rates. Here we present a new mathematical property of entropic formulas, uniform additivity, that is both easily evaluated and rich enough to capture all known quantum additive formulas. We give a complete characterization of uniformly additive functions using the linear programming approach to entropy inequalities. In addition to all known quantum formulas, we find a new and intriguing additive quantity: the completely coherent information. We also uncover a remarkable coincidence---the classical and quantum uniformly additive functions are identical; the tractable answers in classical and quantum information theory are formally equivalent.

In this talk I will review the construction of space starting purely from quantum mechanics and without assuming that the notion of space is attached to a preconceived notion of classical reality. I will show that if one start with the simplest notion of a quantum system encoded into the Heisenberg group algebra one naturally obtain a  notion of space that generalizes the usual notion of Euclidean space. Along the way I will try to illustrate how this notion is in a way going back to the roots of the discovery of QM by Heisenberg-Born-Jordan which never made it past the original papers and giving a critical reading of the subsequent interpretation of space and QM that were put forward by Schrodinger and von Neumann. The notion of space that emerge from quantum mechanics is naturally modular in the sense of Aharonov, it also naturally possess a built-in length scale and renders possible to assign a new notion of locality to non-local superpositions. I will illustrate how  such space can allow reconciliation of relativity with the presence of a fundamental scale.

I will show how to construct such spaces following the original analysis by Mackay and also show that such modular spaces possess a beautiful geometrical structure that generalizes Riemanian geometry to phase space. A geometry we have named Born geometry. I hope this will open wild speculations on the nature of locality in the presence of quantum mechanics and more broadly the nature of classical reality viewed from a quantum perspective.

When the wavefunction of a macroscopic system unitarily evolves from a low-entropy initial state, there is good circumstantial evidence it develops "branches", i.e., a decomposition into orthogonal components that can't be distinguished from the corresponding incoherent mixture by feasible observations, with each component a simultaneous eigenstate of preferred macroscopic observables.  Is this decomposition unique?  Can the number of branches decrease in time?

Answering these questions is hard because branches are defined only intuitively, much like early investigations of algorithms prior to the Church–Turing thesis.  A rigorous definition could give a speed up to certain non-stationary matrix-product state numerical simulations, as well as solve Kent's Set Selection problem in the consistent histories formalism, a 20-year-old open challenge in the foundations of quantum mechanics. I introduce some tentative definitions based on the idea of redundant information, and establishing a uniqueness theorems. A key counterexample is provided by the Shor error-correction code, which demonstrates that branch structure with robust, redundant records on macroscopic scales can hide incompatible (noncommuting) structure on microscopic scales.