13,485 research outputs found
Structure, classifcation, and conformal symmetry, of elementary particles over non-archimedean space-time
It is known that no length or time measurements are possible in sub-Planckian
regions of spacetime. The Volovich hypothesis postulates that the
micro-geometry of spacetime may therefore be assumed to be non-archimedean. In
this letter, the consequences of this hypothesis for the structure,
classification, and conformal symmetry of elementary particles, when spacetime
is a flat space over a non-archimedean field such as the -adic numbers, is
explored. Both the Poincar\'e and Galilean groups are treated. The results are
based on a new variant of the Mackey machine for projective unitary
representations of semidirect product groups which are locally compact and
second countable. Conformal spacetime is constructed over -adic fields and
the impossibility of conformal symmetry of massive and eventually massive
particles is proved
Some Speed-Ups and Speed Limits for Real Algebraic Geometry
We give new positive and negative results (some conditional) on speeding up
computational algebraic geometry over the reals: (1) A new and sharper upper
bound on the number of connected components of a semialgebraic set. Our bound
is novel in that it is stated in terms of the volumes of certain polytopes and,
for a large class of inputs, beats the best previous bounds by a factor
exponential in the number of variables. (2) A new algorithm for approximating
the real roots of certain sparse polynomial systems. Two features of our
algorithm are (a) arithmetic complexity polylogarithmic in the degree of the
underlying complex variety (as opposed to the super-linear dependence in
earlier algorithms) and (b) a simple and efficient generalization to certain
univariate exponential sums. (3) Detecting whether a real algebraic surface
(given as the common zero set of some input straight-line programs) is not
smooth can be done in polynomial time within the classical Turing model (resp.
BSS model over C) only if P=NP (resp. NP<=BPP). The last result follows easily
from an unpublished result of Steve Smale.Comment: This is the final journal version which will appear in Journal of
Complexity. More typos are corrected, and a new section is added where the
bounds here are compared to an earlier result of Benedetti, Loeser, and
Risler. The LaTeX source needs the ajour.cls macro file to compil
Quantum Knitting
We analyze the connections between the mathematical theory of knots and
quantum physics by addressing a number of algorithmic questions related to both
knots and braid groups.
Knots can be distinguished by means of `knot invariants', among which the
Jones polynomial plays a prominent role, since it can be associated with
observables in topological quantum field theory.
Although the problem of computing the Jones polynomial is intractable in the
framework of classical complexity theory, it has been recently recognized that
a quantum computer is capable of approximating it in an efficient way. The
quantum algorithms discussed here represent a breakthrough for quantum
computation, since approximating the Jones polynomial is actually a `universal
problem', namely the hardest problem that a quantum computer can efficiently
handle.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures; to appear in Laser Journa
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