Talks

The Exact Renormalization Group (ERG) is a technique which can be fruitfully applied to systems with local interactions that exhibit a large number of degrees of freedom per correlation length. In the first part of the talk I will give a very general overview of the ERG, focussing on its applications in quantum field theory (QFT) and critical phenomena. In the second part I will discuss how a particular extension of the formalism suggests a new understanding of correlation functions in QFTs, in general, and gauge theories in particular.

A system of spins with complicated interactions between them can have many possible configurations. Many configurations will be local minima of the energy, and to get from one local minimum to another requires changing the state of very many spins. A system like this is called a spin glass, and at low temperatures tends to get caught for very long times at a local minimum of energy, rather than reaching its true ground state. Indeed, in many cases, finding the ground state energy of a spin glass is a computationally hard problem, too hard to be solved on a classical computer or even a quantum computer in any reasonable amount of time. Which types of interactions give us computationally hard problems and spin glasses? I will survey what is known as we close in on finding the simplest complex spin systems.

Landauer's erasure principle states that there is an inherent work cost associated with all irreversible operations, like the erasure of the data stored in a system. The necessary work is determined by our uncertainty: the more we know about the system, the less it costs to erase it. Here, we analyse erasure in a general setting where our information about that system can be quantum mechanical. In this scenario, our uncertainty, measured by a conditional entropy, may become negative. We establish a general relation between quantum conditional entropies and a physical quantity, the work cost of erasure. As a consequence, we obtain a thermodynamic interpretation of negative entropies: they quantify the work that can be gained by a quantum observer erasing a system. (arXiv: 1009.1630)