The possibility of a British earned income tax credit

The possibility of an earned income tax credit, based on the US model, is currently high up the British political agenda. This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of the current British system of in-work benefits, before reviewing the effectiveness of the US Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) scheme. The British and US systems are then directly compared in terms of the net income delivered and the effective tax rate (net benefit deduction rate). Although the evidence in favour of a US-style EITC is weak, two possible variants are considered. The paper concludes that the only future for an EITC is probably as a partial scheme, linked to the amalgamation of in-work and out-of-work benefits, which removes wage subsidisation from the sphere of social security by means of a semi-individualised tax credit. Even so, the same goals could be achieved through the benefit system.

Concepts of quantum non-Markovianity: a hierarchy

Markovian approximation is a widely-employed idea in descriptions of the dynamics of open quantum systems (OQSs). Although it is usually claimed to be a concept inspired by classical Markovianity, the term quantum Markovianity is used inconsistently and often unrigorously in the literature. In this report we compare the descriptions of classical stochastic processes and quantum stochastic processes (as arising in OQSs), and show that there are inherent differences that lead to the non-trivial problem of characterizing quantum non-Markovianity. Rather than proposing a single definition of quantum Markovianity, we study a host of Markov-related concepts in the quantum regime. Some of these concepts have long been used in quantum theory, such as quantum white noise, factorization approximation, divisibility, Lindblad master equation, etc.. Others are first proposed in this report, including those we call past-future independence, no (quantum) information backflow, and composability. All of these concepts are defined under a unified framework, which allows us to rigorously build hierarchy relations among them. With various examples, we argue that the current most often used definitions of quantum Markovianity in the literature do not fully capture the memoryless property of OQSs. In fact, quantum non-Markovianity is highly context-dependent. The results in this report, summarized as a hierarchy figure, bring clarity to the nature of quantum non-Markovianity.Comment: Clarifications and references added; discussion of the related classical hierarchy significantly improved. To appear in Physics Report

Public Employment as Fiscal Policy

macroeconomics, fiscal policy, public employment

Quantum phenomena modelled by interactions between many classical worlds

We investigate whether quantum theory can be understood as the continuum limit of a mechanical theory, in which there is a huge, but finite, number of classical 'worlds', and quantum effects arise solely from a universal interaction between these worlds, without reference to any wave function. Here a `world' means an entire universe with well-defined properties, determined by the classical configuration of its particles and fields. In our approach each world evolves deterministically; probabilities arise due to ignorance as to which world a given observer occupies; and we argue that in the limit of infinitely many worlds the wave function can be recovered (as a secondary object) from the motion of these worlds. We introduce a simple model of such a 'many interacting worlds' approach and show that it can reproduce some generic quantum phenomena---such as Ehrenfest's theorem, wavepacket spreading, barrier tunneling and zero point energy---as a direct consequence of mutual repulsion between worlds. Finally, we perform numerical simulations using our approach. We demonstrate, first, that it can be used to calculate quantum ground states, and second, that it is capable of reproducing, at least qualitatively, the double-slit interference phenomenon.Comment: Published version (including further discussion of interpretation and quantum limit

Stochastic Heisenberg limit: Optimal estimation of a fluctuating phase

The ultimate limits to estimating a fluctuating phase imposed on an optical beam can be found using the recently derived continuous quantum Cramer-Rao bound. For Gaussian stationary statistics, and a phase spectrum scaling asymptotically as 1/omega^p with p>1, the minimum mean-square error in any (single-time) phase estimate scales as N^{-2(p-1)/(p+1)}, where N is the photon flux. This gives the usual Heisenberg limit for a constant phase (as the limit p--> infinity) and provides a stochastic Heisenberg limit for fluctuating phases. For p=2 (Brownian motion), this limit can be attained by phase tracking.Comment: 5+4 pages, to appear in Physical Review Letter

On the dynamics of initially correlated open quantum systems: theory and applications

We show that the dynamics of any open quantum system that is initially correlated with its environment can be described by a set of (or less) completely positive maps, where d is the dimension of the system. Only one such map is required for the special case of no initial correlations. The same maps describe the dynamics of any system-environment state obtained from the initial state by a local operation on the system. The reduction of the system dynamics to a set of completely positive maps allows known numerical and analytic tools for uncorrelated initial states to be applied to the general case of initially correlated states, which we exemplify by solving the qubit dephasing model for such states, and provides a natural approach to quantum Markovianity for this case. We show that this set of completely positive maps can be experimentally characterised using only local operations on the system, via a generalisation of noise spectroscopy protocols. As further applications, we first consider the problem of retrodicting the dynamics of an open quantum system which is in an arbitrary state when it becomes accessible to the experimenter, and explore the conditions under which retrodiction is possible. We also introduce a related one-sided or limited-access tomography protocol for determining an arbitrary bipartite state, evolving under a sufficiently rich Hamiltonian, via local operations and measurements on just one component. We simulate this protocol for a physical model of particular relevance to nitrogen-vacancy centres, and in particular show how to reconstruct the density matrix of a set of three qubits, interacting via dipolar coupling and in the presence of local magnetic fields, by measuring and controlling only one of them.Comment: 19 pages. Comments welcom

The quantum Bell-Ziv-Zakai bounds and Heisenberg limits for waveform estimation

We propose quantum versions of the Bell-Ziv-Zakai lower bounds on the error in multiparameter estimation. As an application we consider measurement of a time-varying optical phase signal with stationary Gaussian prior statistics and a power law spectrum $\sim 1/|\omega|^p$, with $p>1$. With no other assumptions, we show that the mean-square error has a lower bound scaling as $1/{\cal N}^{2(p-1)/(p+1)}$, where ${\cal N}$ is the time-averaged mean photon flux. Moreover, we show that this accuracy is achievable by sampling and interpolation, for any $p>1$. This bound is thus a rigorous generalization of the Heisenberg limit, for measurement of a single unknown optical phase, to a stochastically varying optical phase.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, comments welcom

Ground states in the Many Interacting Worlds approach

Recently the Many-Interacting-Worlds (MIW) approach to a quantum theory without wave functions was proposed. This approach leads quite naturally to numerical integrators of the Schr\"odinger equation. It has been suggested that such integrators may feature advantages over fixed-grid methods for higher numbers of degrees of freedom. However, as yet, little is known about concrete MIW models for more than one spatial dimension and/or more than one particle. In this work we develop the MIW approach further to treat arbitrary degrees of freedom, and provide a systematic study of a corresponding numerical implementation for computing one-particle ground and excited states in one dimension, and ground states in two spatial dimensions. With this step towards the treatment of higher degrees of freedom we hope to stimulate their further study.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure