7,110 research outputs found
The Pondicherry interpretation of quantum mechanics: An overview
An overview of the Pondicherry interpretation of quantum mechanics is
presented. This interpretation proceeds from the recognition that the
fundamental theoretical framework of physics is a probability algorithm, which
serves to describe an objective fuzziness (the literal meaning of Heisenberg's
term "Unschaerfe," usually mistranslated as "uncertainty") by assigning
objective probabilities to the possible outcomes of unperformed measurements.
Although it rejects attempts to construe quantum states as evolving ontological
states, it arrives at an objective description of the quantum world that owes
nothing to observers or the goings-on in physics laboratories. In fact, unless
such attempts are rejected, quantum theory's true ontological implications
cannot be seen. Among these are the radically relational nature of space, the
numerical identity of the corresponding relata, the incomplete spatiotemporal
differentiation of the physical world, and the consequent top-down structure of
reality, which defies attempts to model it from the bottom up, whether on the
basis of an intrinsically differentiated spacetime manifold or out of a
multitude of individual building blocks.Comment: 18 pages, 1 eps figure, v3: with corrections made in proo
Edge and Bulk Transport in the Mixed State of a Type-II Superconductor
By comparing the voltage-current (V-I) curves obtained before and after
cutting a sample of 2H-NbSe2, we separate the bulk and edge contributions to
the transport current at various dissipation levels and derive their respective
V- I curves and critical currents. We find that the edge contribution is
thermally activated across a current dependent surface barrier. By contrast the
bulk V-I curves are linear, as expected from the free flux flow model. The
relative importance of bulk and edge contributions is found to depend on
dissipation level and sample dimensions. We further show that the peak effect
is a sharp bulk phenomenon and that it is broadened by the edge contribution
Witnessing effective entanglement in a continuous variable prepare&measure setup and application to a QKD scheme using postselection
We report an experimental demonstration of effective entanglement in a
prepare&measure type of quantum key distribution protocol. Coherent
polarization states and heterodyne measurement to characterize the transmitted
quantum states are used, thus enabling us to reconstruct directly their
Q-function. By evaluating the excess noise of the states, we experimentally
demonstrate that they fulfill a non-separability criterion previously presented
by Rigas et al. [J. Rigas, O. G\"uhne, N. L\"utkenhaus, Phys. Rev. A 73, 012341
(2006)]. For a restricted eavesdropping scenario we predict key rates using
postselection of the heterodyne measurement results.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures, 2 table
Nonlinear rheology of colloidal dispersions
Colloidal dispersions are commonly encountered in everyday life and represent
an important class of complex fluid. Of particular significance for many
commercial products and industrial processes is the ability to control and
manipulate the macroscopic flow response of a dispersion by tuning the
microscopic interactions between the constituents. An important step towards
attaining this goal is the development of robust theoretical methods for
predicting from first-principles the rheology and nonequilibrium microstructure
of well defined model systems subject to external flow. In this review we give
an overview of some promising theoretical approaches and the phenomena they
seek to describe, focusing, for simplicity, on systems for which the colloidal
particles interact via strongly repulsive, spherically symmetric interactions.
In presenting the various theories, we will consider first low volume fraction
systems, for which a number of exact results may be derived, before moving on
to consider the intermediate and high volume fraction states which present both
the most interesting physics and the most demanding technical challenges. In
the high volume fraction regime particular emphasis will be given to the
rheology of dynamically arrested states.Comment: Review articl
Propylene Carbonate Reexamined: Mode-Coupling Scaling without Factorisation ?
The dynamic susceptibility of propylene carbonate in the moderately viscous
regime above is reinvestigated by incoherent neutron and
depolarised light scattering, and compared to dielectric loss and solvation
response. Depending on the strength of relaxation, a more or less
extended scaling regime is found. Mode-coupling fits yield consistently
and K, although different positions of the
susceptibility minimum indicate that not all observables have reached the
universal asymptotics
Fidelity trade-off for finite ensembles of identically prepared qubits
We calculate the trade-off between the quality of estimating the quantum
state of an ensemble of identically prepared qubits and the minimum level of
disturbance that has to be introduced by this procedure in quantum mechanics.
The trade-off is quantified using two mean fidelities: the operation fidelity
which characterizes the average resemblance of the final qubit state to the
initial one, and the estimation fidelity describing the quality of the obtained
estimate. We analyze properties of quantum operations saturating the
achievability bound for the operation fidelity versus the estimation fidelity,
which allows us to reduce substantially the complexity of the problem of
finding the trade-off curve. The reduced optimization problem has the form of
an eigenvalue problem for a set of tridiagonal matrices, and it can be easily
solved using standard numerical tools.Comment: 26 pages, REVTeX, 2 figures. Few minor corrections, accepted for
publication in Physical Review
Linking Classical and Quantum Key Agreement: Is There "Bound Information"?
After carrying out a protocol for quantum key agreement over a noisy quantum
channel, the parties Alice and Bob must process the raw key in order to end up
with identical keys about which the adversary has virtually no information. In
principle, both classical and quantum protocols can be used for this
processing. It is a natural question which type of protocols is more powerful.
We prove for general states but under the assumption of incoherent
eavesdropping that Alice and Bob share some so-called intrinsic information in
their classical random variables, resulting from optimal measurements, if and
only if the parties' quantum systems are entangled. In addition, we provide
evidence that the potentials of classical and of quantum protocols are equal in
every situation. Consequently, many techniques and results from quantum
information theory directly apply to problems in classical information theory,
and vice versa. For instance, it was previously believed that two parties can
carry out unconditionally secure key agreement as long as they share some
intrinsic information in the adversary's view. The analysis of this purely
classical problem from the quantum information-theoretic viewpoint shows that
this is true in the binary case, but false in general. More explicitly, bound
entanglement, i.e., entanglement that cannot be purified by any quantum
protocol, has a classical counterpart. This "bound intrinsic information"
cannot be distilled to a secret key by any classical protocol. As another
application we propose a measure for entanglement based on classical
information-theoretic quantities.Comment: Accepted for Crypto 2000. 17 page
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