[quantum-info] Talks and Visitors

William Matthews will at northala.net
Sun Oct 17 20:01:12 EDT 2010


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------ This week ------

-- Talks --

Tuesday, Oct 19 2010 4pm, Alice Room,
Lidia del Rio, ETH Zurich
Title: The thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy
Abstract: 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).

Wednesday, Oct 20 2010 2pm, Bob Room,
Daniel Gottesman, Perimeter Institute
Title: Spin Glasses and Computational Complexity
Abstract: 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.

-- Visitors --

Lidia del Rio (ETH Zurich) is at PI until Oct 20th
hosted by Roger Colbeck

Douglas Stebila (Queensland University) is at IQC
until Oct 22nd
https://service.iqc.ca/visitors/visit/137

Nathan Wiebe (University of Calgary) is at IQC
until Oct 22nd
https://service.iqc.ca/visitors/visit/151

Fay Dowker (Imperial College, London) is at PI
until Oct 24th
hosted by Raymond Laflamme

Esther Hanggi (ETH Zurich) will be visiting PI
October 23rd 2010 through October 29th 2010
hosted by Roger Colbeck

------ Upcoming (next 4 weeks - not exhaustive!) ------

-- Talks --

Monday, Oct 25th 4:00pm, PI, Alice Room (301),
Esther Hanggi (ETH Zurich)
"TBA" (Quantum information)

Tuesday, Nov 2nd 1:30pm, U. of Guelph, SCIE1504,
Bei Zeng (IQC and University of Guelph)
"Quantum codes give counterexamples to the unique pre-image conjecture of the n-representability problem"

Wednesday, Nov 8th 4:00pm, PI, Room 405,
Kristan Temme (University of Vienna)
"TBA" (Perimeter Institute Quantum Discussions)

Monday, Nov 15th 12:30 pm, IQC (RAC1) Room 2009
Patrick Hayden (McGill and Perimeter Institute)
"TBA"

-- Visitors --

Patrick Hayden (McGill University) will be visiting PI
November 1st through December 15th - Quantum Information
hosted by Neil Turok

Paolo Perinotti (Universita degli Studi di Pavia) will be visiting PI
November 4th through November 18th
hosted by Giulio Chiribella

Kristan Temme (University of Vienna) will be visiting PI
November 6th through November 12th
hosted by Michele Mosca

Taylor Hughes (niversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) will be visiting PI
November 8th through November 22nd
hosted by Alioscia Hamma

Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano (Universita degli Studi di Pavia) will be visiting PI
November 9th through December 2nd 
hosted by Giulio Chiribella

Marcin Pawlowski (University of Gdańsk) will be visiting PI
November 14th through November 18th
hosted by Giulio Chiribella


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