Connes distance by examples: Homothetic spectral metric spaces

We study metric properties stemming from the Connes spectral distance on three types of non compact noncommutative spaces which have received attention recently from various viewpoints in the physics literature. These are the noncommutative Moyal plane, a family of harmonic Moyal spectral triples for which the Dirac operator squares to the harmonic oscillator Hamiltonian and a family of spectral triples with Dirac operator related to the Landau operator. We show that these triples are homothetic spectral metric spaces, having an infinite number of distinct pathwise connected components. The homothetic factors linking the distances are related to determinants of effective Clifford metrics. We obtain as a by product new examples of explicit spectral distance formulas. The results are discussed.Comment: 23 pages. Misprints corrected, references updated, one remark added at the end of the section 3. To appear in Review in Mathematical Physic

An Obstruction to Quantization of the Sphere

In the standard example of strict deformation quantization of the symplectic sphere $S^2$, the set of allowed values of the quantization parameter $\hbar$ is not connected; indeed, it is almost discrete. Li recently constructed a class of examples (including $S^2$) in which $\hbar$ can take any value in an interval, but these examples are badly behaved. Here, I identify a natural additional axiom for strict deformation quantization and prove that it implies that the parameter set for quantizing $S^2$ is never connected.Comment: 23 page. v2: changed sign conventio

Tools for Quantum Algorithms

We present efficient implementations of a number of operations for quantum computers. These include controlled phase adjustments of the amplitudes in a superposition, permutations, approximations of transformations and generalizations of the phase adjustments to block matrix transformations. These operations generalize those used in proposed quantum search algorithms.Comment: LATEX, 15 pages, Minor changes: one author's e-mail and one reference numbe

Flight Gate Assignment with a Quantum Annealer

Optimal flight gate assignment is a highly relevant optimization problem from airport management. Among others, an important goal is the minimization of the total transit time of the passengers. The corresponding objective function is quadratic in the binary decision variables encoding the flight-to-gate assignment. Hence, it is a quadratic assignment problem being hard to solve in general. In this work we investigate the solvability of this problem with a D-Wave quantum annealer. These machines are optimizers for quadratic unconstrained optimization problems (QUBO). Therefore the flight gate assignment problem seems to be well suited for these machines. We use real world data from a mid-sized German airport as well as simulation based data to extract typical instances small enough to be amenable to the D-Wave machine. In order to mitigate precision problems, we employ bin packing on the passenger numbers to reduce the precision requirements of the extracted instances. We find that, for the instances we investigated, the bin packing has little effect on the solution quality. Hence, we were able to solve small problem instances extracted from real data with the D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer.Comment: Updated figure

Strict Deformation Quantization for a Particle in a Magnetic Field

Recently, we introduced a mathematical framework for the quantization of a particle in a variable magnetic field. It consists in a modified form of the Weyl pseudodifferential calculus and a C*-algebraic setting, these two points of view being isomorphic in a suitable sense. In the present paper we leave Planck's constant vary, showing that one gets a strict deformation quantization in the sense of Rieffel. In the limit h --> 0 one recovers a Poisson algebra induced by a symplectic form defined in terms of the magnetic field.Comment: 23 page

An Introduction to Quantum Computing for Non-Physicists

Richard Feynman's observation that quantum mechanical effects could not be simulated efficiently on a computer led to speculation that computation in general could be done more efficiently if it used quantum effects. This speculation appeared justified when Peter Shor described a polynomial time quantum algorithm for factoring integers. In quantum systems, the computational space increases exponentially with the size of the system which enables exponential parallelism. This parallelism could lead to exponentially faster quantum algorithms than possible classically. The catch is that accessing the results, which requires measurement, proves tricky and requires new non-traditional programming techniques. The aim of this paper is to guide computer scientists and other non-physicists through the conceptual and notational barriers that separate quantum computing from conventional computing. We introduce basic principles of quantum mechanics to explain where the power of quantum computers comes from and why it is difficult to harness. We describe quantum cryptography, teleportation, and dense coding. Various approaches to harnessing the power of quantum parallelism are explained, including Shor's algorithm, Grover's algorithm, and Hogg's algorithms. We conclude with a discussion of quantum error correction

Privacy-Preserving Aggregation of Time-Series Data

The conference paper can be viewed at: http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/ndss/11/proceedings.shtmlSession 9: PrivacyWe consider how an untrusted data aggregator can learn desired statistics over multiple participants’ data, without compromising each individual’s privacy. We propose a construction that allows a group of participants to periodically upload encrypted values to a data aggregator, such that the aggregator is able to compute the sum of all participants’ values in every time period, but is unable to learn anything else. We achieve strong privacy guarantees using two main techniques. First, we show how to utilize applied cryptographic techniques to allow the aggregator to decrypt the sum from multiple ciphertexts encrypted under different user keys. Second, we describe a distributed data randomization procedure that guarantees the differential privacy of the outcome statistic, even when a subset of participants might be compromised.published_or_final_versio

Privacy-Preserving Aggregation of Time-Series Data

The conference paper can be viewed at: http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/ndss/11/proceedings.shtmlSession 9: PrivacyWe consider how an untrusted data aggregator can learn desired statistics over multiple participants’ data, without compromising each individual’s privacy. We propose a construction that allows a group of participants to periodically upload encrypted values to a data aggregator, such that the aggregator is able to compute the sum of all participants’ values in every time period, but is unable to learn anything else. We achieve strong privacy guarantees using two main techniques. First, we show how to utilize applied cryptographic techniques to allow the aggregator to decrypt the sum from multiple ciphertexts encrypted under different user keys. Second, we describe a distributed data randomization procedure that guarantees the differential privacy of the outcome statistic, even when a subset of participants might be compromised.published_or_final_versio

Leibniz Seminorms and Best Approximation from C*-subalgebras

We show that if B is a C*-subalgebra of a C*-algebra A such that B contains a bounded approximate identity for A, and if L is the pull-back to A of the quotient norm on A/B, then L is strongly Leibniz. In connection with this situation we study certain aspects of best approximation of elements of a unital C*-algebra by elements of a unital C*-subalgebra.Comment: 24 pages. Intended for the proceedings of the conference "Operator Algebras and Related Topics". v2: added a corollary to the main theorem, plus several minor improvements v3: much simplified proof of a key lemma, corollary to main theorem added v4: Many minor improvements. Section numbers increased by

Deformations of quantum field theories on de Sitter spacetime

Quantum field theories on de Sitter spacetime with global U(1) gauge symmetry are deformed using the joint action of the internal symmetry group and a one-parameter group of boosts. The resulting theory turns out to be wedge-local and non-isomorphic to the initial one for a class of theories, including the free charged Dirac field. The properties of deformed models coming from inclusions of CAR-algebras are studied in detail.Comment: 26 pages, no figure