The Physical Interpretation of PT-invariant Potentials

A purely imaginary potential can provide a phenomenological description of creation and absorption of quantum mechanical particles. PT-invariance of such a potential ensures that the non-unitary phenomena occur in a balanced manner. In spite of wells and sinks which locally violate the conservation of quantum probability, there is no net get loss or gain of particles. This, in turn, is intuitively consistent with real energy eigenvalues.Comment: 4 page

Detecting broken PT-symmetry

A fundamental problem in the theory of PT-invariant quantum systems is to determine whether a given system 'respects' this symmetry or not. If not, the system usually develops non-real eigenvalues. It is shown in this contribution how to algorithmically detect the existence of complex eigenvalues for a given PT-symmetric matrix. The procedure uses classical results from stability theory which qualitatively locate the zeros of real polynomials in the complex plane. The interest and value of the present approach lies in the fact that it avoids diagonalization of the Hamiltonian at hand

Mutually Unbiased Bases and Semi-definite Programming

A complex Hilbert space of dimension six supports at least three but not more than seven mutually unbiased bases. Two computer-aided analytical methods to tighten these bounds are reviewed, based on a discretization of parameter space and on Grobner bases. A third algorithmic approach is presented: the non-existence of more than three mutually unbiased bases in composite dimensions can be decided by a global optimization method known as semidefinite programming. The method is used to confirm that the spectral matrix cannot be part of a complete set of seven mutually unbiased bases in dimension six.Comment: 11 pages

All Mutually Unbiased Product Bases in Dimension Six

All mutually unbiased bases in dimension six consisting of product states only are constructed. Several continuous families of pairs and two triples of mutually unbiased product bases are found to exist but no quadruple. The exhaustive classification leads to a proof that a complete set of seven mutually unbiased bases, if it exists, cannot contain a triple of mutually unbiased product bases.Comment: 32 pages, 3 figures, identical to published versio