Talks

Unexplained hierarchies and the quest for naturalness have driven model-building efforts in particle physics and cosmology for the past few decades. I will speak about various approaches to problems of 'unnatural' fine tunings, in the context of supersymmetry, inflation and LHC phenomenology respectively.

Hubeny identified a scenario in which a charged particle falling toward a near-extreme Reissner-Nordstrom black hole can penetrate the black hole and drive it beyond the extremal limit, thereby giving rise to an apparent violation of cosmic censorship. A version of this scenario, relevant to a Kerr black hole and involving a particle with orbital and/or spin angular momentum, was recently examined by Jacobson and Sotiriou (following up on earlier work by Hod); here also the black hole is driven beyond the extremal limit. The Hubeny analysis was inconclusive, however, because in her scenario the particle crosses the horizon with a near-vanishing acceleration; the test-body acceleration is of the same order of magnitude as the acceleration produced by the particle's own electromagnetic self-force, which was not fully incorporated in the analysis. In this talk we report on our computation of the electromagnetic self-force acting on a charged particle falling radially toward a Reissner-Nordstrom black hole, and we reveal whether the self-force acts as a cosmic censor by preventing the particle from reaching the event horizon.

We discuss the calculation of higher loop contributions to the anomalous dimensions of operators in N=6 Superconformal Chern-Simons theories. These lead us to conjecture the form of an interpolating function of the 't Hooft coupling that is not determined by integrability.

This is a geometric tutorial about straight and twisted vectors and forms (ie, de Rham currents) leading to some wild thoughts about the EM field as a *thing*, ie with properties similar to a piece of matter; and to some even wilder thoughts about a metric-free GR.

Recently, emergent phenomena have started to attract more attention. Instead of assuming a symmetric world, one begins with a chaotic one. In this talk, I will describe this picture, discuss the main constraints on emergence, and then present a few phenomenological procedures that can be implemented to study the emergent phenomena.

This talk presents sufficient conditions for equilibration and thermalization of subsystems within closed many body quantum systems. That is, we identify when the local properties of the equilibrium state resemble those of a thermal state. With this aim, the recent progress in this field is reviewed and we introduce a novel perturbation technique for a realistic weak coupling between the subsystem and its environment. Unlike the standard perturbation theory, our technique is robust in the thermodynamic limit. Based on our thermalization results, we construct a simple and fully general quantum algorithm for preparing Gibbs states with a certified runtime and error bonds.

In my talk I raise the question of the fundamental limits to the size of thermal machines - refrigerators, heat pumps and work producing engines - and I will present the smallest possible ones. I will also discuss the issue of a possible complementarity between size and efficiency and show that even the smallest machines could be maximally efficient. Finally I will present a new point of view over what is work and what do thermal machines actually do.

I provide a reformulation of finite dimensional quantum theory in the circuit framework in terms of mathematical axioms, and a reconstruction of quantum theory from operational postulates. The mathematical axioms for quantum theory are the following: [Axiom 1] Operations correspond to operators. [Axiom 2] Every complete set of positive operators corresponds to a complete set of operations. The following operational postulates are shown to be equivalent to these mathematical axioms: [P1] Definiteness. Associated with any given pure state is a unique maximal effect giving probability equal to one. This maximal effect does not give probability equal to one for any other pure state. [P2] Information locality. A maximal measurement on a composite system is effected if we perform maximal measurements on each of the components. [P3] Tomographic locality. The state of a composite system can be determined from the statistics collected by making measurements on the components. [P4] Compound permutatability. There exists a compound reversible transformation on any system effecting any given permutation of any given maximal set of distinguishable states for that system. [P5] Preparability. Filters are non-mixing and non-flattening. Hence, from these postulates we can reconstruct all the usual features of quantum theory: States are represented by positive operators, transformations by completely positive trace non-increasing maps, and effects by positive operators. The Born rule (i.e. the trace rule) for calculating probabilities also follows. See arXiv:1104.2066 for more details. These operational postulates are deeper than those I gave ten years ago in quant-ph/0101012.

Quantum theory can be thought of a noncommutative generalization of classical probability and, from this perspective, it is puzzling that no quantum generalization of conditional probability is in widespread use. In this talk, I discuss one such generalization and show how it can unify the description of ensemble preparations of quantum states, POVM measurements and the description of correlations between quantum systems. The conditional states formalism allows for a description of prepare-and-measure experiments that is neutral with respect to the direction of inference, such that both the retrodictive formalism and the more usual predictive formalism are consequences of a more fundamental description in terms of a conditionally independent tripartite state, and the two formalisms are related by a quantum generalization of Bayes' rule. As an application, I give a generalized argument for the pooling rule proposed by Spekkens and Wiseman that is a direct analog of a result in classical supra-Bayesian pooling.

We will analyze different aspects of locality in causal operational probabilistic theories. We will first discuss the notion of local state and local objective information in operational probabilistic theories, and define an operational notion of discord that coincides with quantum discord in the case of quantum theory. Using such notion, we will show that the only theory in which all separable states have null discord is the classical one. We will then analyze locality of transformations, reviewing some general properties of no-signaling channels in causal theories. We will show that it is natural to define transformations on no-signaling channels that cannot be extended to all bipartite channels, and discuss the consequences of this fact on information processing.

The model of local non-Gaussianity, parameterized by the constant non-linearity parameter fNL, is an extremely popular description of non-Gaussianity. However, a mild scale-dependence of fNL is natural. This scale dependence is a new observable, potentially detectable with the Planck satellite, which helps to further discriminate between models of inflation. It is sensitive to properties of the early universe which are not probed by the standard observables. In a complementary way, the trispectrum also contains important information about non-Gaussianity which the bispectrum does not capture. We explicitly calculate the scale dependence and trispectrum in several models including one with a very large infrared-loop contribution to the bispectrum and in various realizations of the curvaton scenario.