arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to A. Winter.
It's a bit tedious, but as John Doe and Jean Roe have insisted on offering further comments on our comprehensive refutation of the former's already tiringly obstinate advances, we feel compelled to review their not even wrong opinions once again, hoping to put some sense back into the discourse.
The typically large distances, extinction, and crowding of Galactic supermassive star clusters have so far hampered the identification of their very low mass members, required to extend our understanding of star and planet formation, and early stellar evolution, to starburst. This situation has now evolved thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and its unmatched resolution and sensitivity in the infrared. In this paper, the third of the series of the Extended Westerlund 1 and 2 Open Clusters Survey (EWOCS), we present JWST/NIRCam and JWST/MIRI observations of the supermassive star cluster Westerlund 1. These observations are specifically designed to unveil the cluster members down to the BD mass regime, and to allow us to select and study the protoplanetary disks and to study the mutual feedback between the cluster members and the surrounding environment. Westerlund 1 was observed as part of JWST GO-1905 for 23.6 hours. The data have been reduced using the JWST calibration pipeline, together with specific tools necessary to remove artifacts. Source identification and photometry were performed with DOLPHOT. The MIRI images show a plethora of different features. Diffuse nebular emission is observed around the cluster, which is typically composed of myriads of droplet-like features pointing toward the cluster center or the group of massive stars surrounding the WR star W72/A. A long pillar is also observed in the NW. The MIRI images also show resolved shells and outflows surrounding the M-type RSG W20, W26, W75, and W237, the sgB[e] star W9 and the YHG W4. The color-magnitude diagrams built using the NIRCam photometry show a clear cluster sequence, which is marked in its upper part by the 1828 NIRCam stars with X-ray counterparts. NIRCam observations using the F115W filter have reached the 23.8 mag limit with 50\% completeness (roughly corresponding to a 0.06 Msol brown dwarf).
We critically examine the often-made observation that "quantum winter [or some other winter] is coming", and the related admonition to prepare for this or that winter, inevitably bound to arrive. What we find based on even the most superficial look at the available evidence is that such statements not only are overblown hype, but are also factually wrong: Winter is here, and the real question is rather for how long it/they will stay.
Context. With a mass exceeding several 10^4 solar masses and a rich and dense population of massive stars, supermassive young star clusters represent the most massive star-forming environment that is dominated by the feedback from massive stars and gravitational interactions among stars. Aims. In this paper we present the "Extended Westerlund 1 and 2 Open Clusters Survey" (EWOCS) project, which aims to investigate the influence of the starburst environment on the formation of stars and planets, and on the evolution of both low and high mass stars. The primary targets of this project are Westerlund 1 and 2, the closest supermassive star clusters to the Sun. Methods. The project is based primarily on recent observations conducted with the Chandra and JWST observatories. Specifically, the Chandra survey of Westerlund 1 consists of 36 new ACIS-I observations, nearly co-pointed, for a total exposure time of 1 Msec. Additionally, we included 8 archival Chandra/ACIS-S observations. This paper presents the resulting catalog of X-ray sources within and around Westerlund 1. Sources were detected by combining various existing methods, and photon extraction and source validation were carried out using the ACIS-Extract software. Results. The EWOCS X-ray catalog comprises 5963 validated sources out of the 9420 initially provided to ACIS-Extract, reaching a photon flux threshold of approximately 2x10^-8 photons/cm^2/s. The X-ray sources exhibit a highly concentrated spatial distribution, with 1075 sources located within the central 1 arcminute. We have successfully detected X-ray emissions from 126 out of the 166 known massive stars of the cluster, and we have collected over 71000 photons from the magnetar CXO J164710.20-455217
A detailed investigation of hadronic interactions is performed using $\pi^-$-mesons with energies in the range 2--10 GeV incident on a high granularity silicon-tungsten electromagnetic calorimeter. The data were recorded at FNAL in 2008. The region in which the $\pi^-$-mesons interact with the detector material and the produced secondary particles are characterised using a novel track-finding algorithm that reconstructs tracks within hadronic showers in a calorimeter in the absence of a magnetic field. The principle of carrying out detector monitoring and calibration using secondary tracks is also demonstrated.
The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) is a mature option for the future of high energy physics. It combines the benefits of the clean environment of $e^+e^-$ colliders with operation at high centre-of-mass energies, allowing to probe scales beyond the reach of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for many scenarios of new physics. This places the CLIC project at a privileged spot in between the precision and energy frontiers, with capabilities that will significantly extend knowledge on both fronts at the end of the LHC era. In this report we review and revisit the potential of CLIC to search, directly and indirectly, for physics beyond the Standard Model.
We unify and consolidate various results about non-signall-ing games, a subclass of non-local two-player one-round games, by introducing and studying several new families of games and establishing general theorems about them, which extend a number of known facts in a variety of special cases. Among these families are {\it reflexive games,} which are characterised as the hardest non-signalling games that can be won using a given set of strategies. We introduce {\it imitation games,} in which the players display linked behaviour, and which contains as subclasses the classes of variable assignment games, binary constraint system games, synchronous games, many games based on graphs, and {\it unique} games. We associate a C*-algebra $C^*(\mathcal{G})$ to any imitation game $\mathcal{G}$, and show that the existence of perfect quantum commuting (resp.\ quantum, local) strategies of $\mathcal{G}$ can be characterised in terms of properties of this C*-algebra, extending known results about synchronous games. We single out a subclass of imitation games, which we call {\it mirror games,} and provide a characterisation of their quantum commuting strategies that has an algebraic flavour, showing in addition that their approximately quantum perfect strategies arise from amenable traces on the encoding C*-algebra. We describe the main classes of non-signalling correlations in terms of states on operator system tensor products.
A highly granular electromagnetic calorimeter with scintillator strip readout is being developed for future lepton collider experiments. A prototype of 21.5 $X_0$ depth and $180 \times 180 $mm$^2$ transverse dimensions was constructed, consisting of 2160 individually read out $10 \times 45 \times 3$ mm$^3$ scintillator strips. This prototype was tested using electrons of 2--32 GeV at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility in 2009. Deviations from linear energy response were less than 1.1\%, and the intrinsic energy resolution was determined to be $(12.5 \pm 0.1 (\mathrm{stat.}) \pm0.4 (\mathrm{syst.}))\%/\sqrt{E[\mathrm{GeV}]}\oplus (1.2 \pm 0.1(\mathrm{stat.})^{+0.6}_{-0.7}(\mathrm{syst.}))\%$, where the uncertainties correspond to statistical and systematic sources, respectively.
Understanding the resource consumption in distributed scenarios is one of the main goals of quantum information theory. A prominent example for such a scenario is the task of quantum state merging where two parties aim to merge their parts of a tripartite quantum state. In standard quantum state merging, entanglement is considered as an expensive resource, while local quantum operations can be performed at no additional cost. However, recent developments show that some local operations could be more expensive than others: it is reasonable to distinguish between local incoherent operations and local operations which can create coherence. This idea leads us to the task of incoherent quantum state merging, where one of the parties has free access to local incoherent operations only. In this case the resources of the process are quantified by pairs of entanglement and coherence. Here, we develop tools for studying this process, and apply them to several relevant scenarios. While quantum state merging can lead to a gain of entanglement, our results imply that no merging procedure can gain entanglement and coherence at the same time. We also provide a general lower bound on the entanglement-coherence sum, and show that the bound is tight for all pure states. Our results also lead to an incoherent version of Schumacher compression: in this case the compression rate is equal to the von Neumann entropy of the diagonal elements of the corresponding quantum state.
We analyze a cryptographic protocol for generating a distributed secret key from correlations that violate a Bell inequality by a sufficient amount, and prove its security against eavesdroppers, constrained only by the assumption that any information accessible to them must be compatible with the non-signaling principle. The claim holds with respect to the state-of-the-art security definition used in cryptography, known as universally-composable security. The non-signaling assumption only refers to the statistics of measurement outcomes depending on the choices of measurements; hence security is independent of the internal workings of the devices --- they do not even need to follow the laws of quantum theory. This is relevant for practice as a correct and complete modeling of realistic devices is generally impossible. The techniques developed are general and can be applied to other Bell inequality-based protocols. In particular, we provide a scheme for estimating Bell-inequality violations when the samples are not independent and identically distributed.
Information theory has its particles, bits and qubits, just as physics has electrons and photons. However, in physics we have a special category of objects with no clear counterparts in information theory: quasiparticles. They are introduced to simplify complex emergent phenomena making otherwise very difficult calculations possible and providing additional insight into the inner workings of the system. We show that we can adopt a similar approach in information theory. We introduce the hyperbits, the first information quasiparticles which we prove to be a resource equivalent to entanglement and classical communication, and give examples how they can be used to simplify calculations and get more insight into communication protocols.
A locking protocol between two parties is as follows: Alice gives an encrypted classical message to Bob which she does not want Bob to be able to read until she gives him the key. If Alice is using classical resources, and she wants to approach unconditional security, then the key and the message must have comparable sizes. But if Alice prepares a quantum state, the size of the key can be comparatively negligible. This effect is called quantum locking. Entanglement does not play a role in this quantum advantage. We show that, in this scenario, the quantum discord quantifies the advantage of the quantum protocol over the corresponding classical one for any classical-quantum state.
Quantum discord quantifies non-classical correlations going beyond the standard classification of quantum states into entangled and unentangled ones. Although it has received considerable attention, it still lacks any precise interpretation in terms of some protocol in which quantum features are relevant. Here we give quantum discord its first operational meaning in terms of entanglement consumption in an extended quantum state merging protocol. We further relate the asymmetry of quantum discord with the performance imbalance in quantum state merging and dense coding.
Quantum physics exhibits remarkable distinguishing characteristics. For example, it gives only probabilistic predictions (non-determinism) and does not allow copying of unknown state (no-cloning). Quantum correlations may be stronger than any classical ones, nevertheless information cannot be transmitted faster than light (no-signaling). However, all these features do not single out quantum physics. A broad class of theories exist which share such traits with quantum mechanics, while they allow even stronger than quantum correlations. Here, we introduce the principle of Information Causality. It states that information that Bob can gain about a previously completely unknown to him data set of Alice, by using all his local resources (which may be correlated with her resources) and a classical communication from her, is bounded by the information volume of the communication. In other words, if Alice communicates m bits to Bob, the total information access that Bob gains to her data is not greater than m. For m=0, Information Causality reduces to the standard no-signaling principle. We show that this new principle is respected both in classical and quantum physics, whereas it is violated by all the no-signaling correlations which are stronger that the strongest quantum correlations. Maximally strong no-signalling correlations would allow Bob access to any m bit subset of the whole data set held by Alice. If only one bit is sent by Alice (m=1), this is tantamount to Bob being able to access the value of any single bit of Alice's data (but of course not all of them). We suggest that Information Causality, a generalization of no-signaling, might be one of the foundational properties of Nature.
We consider the question of how large a subspace of a given bipartite quantum system can be when the subspace contains only highly entangled states. This is motivated in part by results of Hayden et al., which show that in large d x d--dimensional systems there exist random subspaces of dimension almost d^2, all of whose states have entropy of entanglement at least log d - O(1). It is also related to results due to Parthasarathy on the dimension of completely entangled subspaces, which have connections with the construction of unextendible product bases. Here we take as entanglement measure the Schmidt rank, and determine, for every pair of local dimensions dA and dB, and every r, the largest dimension of a subspace consisting only of entangled states of Schmidt rank r or larger. This exact answer is a significant improvement on the best bounds that can be obtained using random subspace techniques. We also determine the converse: the largest dimension of a subspace with an upper bound on the Schmidt rank. Finally, we discuss the question of subspaces containing only states with Schmidt equal to r.
The exponential speed-up of quantum walks on certain graphs, relative to classical particles diffusing on the same graph, is a striking observation. It has suggested the possibility of new fast quantum algorithms. We point out here that quantum mechanics can also lead, through the phenomenon of localization, to exponential suppression of motion on these graphs (even in the absence of decoherence). In fact, for physical embodiments of graphs, this will be the generic behaviour. It also has implications for proposals for using spin networks, including spin chains, as quantum communication channels.
We introduce two dual, purely quantum protocols: for entanglement distillation assisted by quantum communication (``mother'' protocol) and for entanglement assisted quantum communication (``father'' protocol). We show how a large class of ``children'' protocols (including many previously known ones) can be derived from the two by direct application of teleportation or super-dense coding. Furthermore, the parent may be recovered from most of the children protocols by making them ``coherent''. We also summarize the various resource trade-offs these protocols give rise to.
Quantum Shannon theory is loosely defined as a collection of coding theorems, such as classical and quantum source compression, noisy channel coding theorems, entanglement distillation, etc., which characterize asymptotic properties of quantum and classical channels and states. In this paper we advocate a unified approach to an important class of problems in quantum Shannon theory, consisting of those that are bipartite, unidirectional and memoryless. We formalize two principles that have long been tacitly understood. First, we describe how the Church of the larger Hilbert space allows us to move flexibly between states, channels, ensembles and their purifications. Second, we introduce finite and asymptotic (quantum) information processing resources as the basic objects of quantum Shannon theory and recast the protocols used in direct coding theorems as inequalities between resources. We develop the rules of a resource calculus which allows us to manipulate and combine resource inequalities. This framework simplifies many coding theorem proofs and provides structural insights into the logical dependencies among coding theorems. We review the above-mentioned basic coding results and show how a subset of them can be unified into a family of related resource inequalities. Finally, we use this family to find optimal trade-off curves for all protocols involving one noisy quantum resource and two noiseless ones.