The Quantum Formalization Drive

The quantum harmonic oscillator is the Schrödinger operator of a particle in a quadratic potential. It describes small vibrations around an equilibrium, the modes of the electromagnetic field, and phonons in a crystal. It is also one of the very few Schrödinger operators whose spectrum and eigenfunctions are known in closed form. The eigenvalues are equally…

In quantum mechanics the spectrum of a Hamiltonian splits into two parts that behave very differently under perturbation. Isolated eigenvalues of finite multiplicity (bound states) move, split or disappear when the operator is changed even slightly; the rest of the spectrum, which carries scattering states and accumulation points of eigenvalues, is far more…

The spectral gap of a quantum many-body Hamiltonian is the difference between the energy of its ground state and the energy of its first excited state, in the limit of infinitely many particles. Whether a given microscopic interaction produces a gapped or a gapless system decides much of the macroscopic physics: gapped systems have exponentially decaying…

A nonlocal game is played between a classical referee and two or more cooperating players who are not allowed to communicate during the game. In the two-player, one-round setting, the referee samples a pair of questions $(x,y)$ from a distribution $\mu$, sends $x$ to Alice and $y$ to Bob, and receives answers $a$ and $b$. The players win when a predicate $V(x,y,a,b)$ acce…

A quantum computer protected by an error-correcting code can apply only a small set of gates fault-tolerantly, so every other gate must be approximated by a sequence from that set. The existence of short approximating sequences is the content of the Solovay–Kitaev theorem (Kitaev 1997; Nielsen and Chuang 2000). A practical search for the best sequence needs…

For a quantum system split into parts, the entanglement entropy $S(A)$ of a region $A$ is the von Neumann entropy of the reduced density matrix of $A$. Every such entropy obeys strong subadditivity (Lieb–Ruskai, 1973): for regions $A$ and $B$,

The concept of reflection positivity has its origins in the work of Osterwalder--Schrader on constructive quantum field theory. It is a fundamental tool to construct a relativistic quantum field theory as a unitary representation of the Poincare group from a non-relativistic field theory as a representation of the euclidean motion group. This is the second…

Imagine a task in which a group of separated players aim to simulate a statistic that violates a Bell inequality. Given measurement choices the players shall announce an output based solely on the results of local operations -- which they can discuss before the separation -- on shared random data and shared copies of a so-called unit correlation. In the…

Remote quantum entanglement can enable numerous applications including distributed quantum computation, secure communication, and precision sensing. In this paper, we consider how a quantum network-nodes equipped with limited quantum processing capabilities connected via lossy optical links-can distribute high-rate entanglement simultaneously between…

We prove that for generalised partitions of unity ${φ_i \mid i \in I}$ and coverings $\mathfrak{U}:={φ_i^{-1} (R \setminus {0}) \mid i \in I}$ of a topological space $X$ the cohomology of abstract $\mathfrak{U}$-local cochains coincides with the cohomology of continuous $\mathfrak{U}$-local cochains, provided the coefficients are loop contractible. Furthermore we…

A decoherence-free (DF) subspace is a subspace of a quantum system's state space on which the coupling to the environment acts trivially, so that quantum information stored there is not degraded. D. Bacon's thesis develops the theory in finite dimension: by its Theorem 5.3.1 a subspace is decoherence-free exactly when every system operator in the…

We introduce new quantum key distribution protocols using quantum continuous variables, that are secure against individual attacks for any transmission of the optical line between Alice and Bob. In particular, it is not required that this transmission is larger than 50 %. Though squeezing or entanglement may be helpful, they are not required, and there is…

Weak morphisms of non-abelian complexes of length 2, or crossed modules, are morphisms of the associated 2-group stacks, or gr-stacks. We present a full description of the weak morphisms in terms of diagrams we call butterflies. We give a complete description of the resulting bicategory of crossed modules, which we show is fibered and biequivalent to the…

If q : P -> M is a principal K-bundle over the compact manifold M, then any invariant symmetric V-valued bilinear form on the Lie algebra k of K defines a Lie algebra extension of the gauge algebra by a space of bundle-valued 1-forms modulo exact forms. In the present paper we analyze the integrability of this extension to a Lie group extension for…

Let $G$ be a Lie group and $G\to\Aut(G)$ be the canonical group homomorphism induced by the adjoint action of a group on itself. We give an explicit description of a 1-1 correspondence between Morita equivalence classes of, on the one hand, principal 2-group $[G\to\Aut(G)]$-bundles over Lie groupoids and, on the other hand, $G$-extensions of Lie groupoids (i.e.\…

I categorify the definition of fibre bundle, replacing smooth manifolds with differentiable categories, Lie groups with coherent Lie 2-groups, and bundles with a suitable notion of 2-bundle. To link this with previous work, I show that certain 2-categories of principal 2-bundles are equivalent to certain 2-categories of (nonabelian) gerbes. This…

In this paper, we present an infinity-categorical version of the theory of monoidal categories. We show that the infinity category of spectra admits an essentially unique monoidal structure (such that the tensor product preserves colimits in each variable), and thereby recover the classical smash-product operation on spectra. We develop a general theory of…

Algebraic structures such as monoids, groups, and categories can be formulated within a category using commutative diagrams. In many common categories these reduce to familiar cases. In particular, group objects in Grp are abelian groups, while internal categories in Grp are equivalent both to group objects in Cat and to crossed modules of groups. In this…

We define the notion of {\em classifying space} of a topological stack and show that every topological stack \X has a classifying space X which is a topological space well-defined up to weak homotopy equivalence. Under a certain paracompactness condition on \X, we show that X is actually well-defined up to homotopy equivalence. These results are formulated…

The first goal of this survey paper is to argue that if orbifolds are groupoids, then the collection of orbifolds and their maps has to be thought of as a 2-category. Compare this with the classical definition of Satake and Thurston of orbifolds as a 1-category of sets with extra structure and/or with the "modern" definition of orbifolds as proper etale Lie…

The ordinary (or classical) Birman-Wenzl-Murakami algebras were initially conceived as an algebraic framework for the Kauffman link invariant. They also appear as centralizer algebras for representations of quantum universal enveloping algebras of orthogonal or symplectic types. It was shown by Morton and Wassermann that the BMW algebras are isomorphic to…

We show explicitly how to realize an arbitrary linear unitary Bogoliubov transformation (LUBO) on a multi-mode quantum state through homodyne-based one-way quantum computation. Any LUBO can be approximated by means of a fixed, finite-sized, sufficiently squeezed Gaussian cluster state that allows for the implementation of beam splitters (in form of…

We study (pre-)sheaves in bicategories on geometric categories: smooth manifolds, manifolds with a Lie group action and Lie groupoids. We present three main results: we describe equivariant descent, we generalize the plus construction to our setting and show that the plus construction yields a 2-stackification for 2-prestacks. Finally we show that, for a…

Categorifying the concept of topological group, one obtains the notion of a 'topological 2-group'. This in turn allows a theory of 'principal 2-bundles' generalizing the usual theory of principal bundles. It is well-known that under mild conditions on a topological group G and a space M, principal G-bundles over M are classified by either the first Cech…

We consider the secret key capacity of the thermal loss channel, which is modeled by a beam splitter mixing an input signal mode with an environmental thermal mode. This capacity is the maximum value of secret bits that two remote parties can generate by means of the most general adaptive protocols assisted by unlimited and two-way classical communication.…