No Arabic abstract
In 1924 David Hilbert conceived a paradoxical tale involving a hotel with an infinite number of rooms to illustrate some aspects of the mathematical notion of infinity. In continuous-variable quantum mechanics we routinely make use of infinite state spaces: here we show that such a theoretical apparatus can accommodate an analog of Hilberts hotel paradox. We devise a protocol that, mimicking what happens to the guests of the hotel, maps the amplitudes of an infinite eigenbasis to twice their original quantum number in a coherent and deterministic manner, producing infinitely many unoccupied levels in the process. We demonstrate the feasibility of the protocol by experimentally realising it on the orbital angular momentum of a paraxial field. This new non-Gaussian operation may be exploited for example for enhancing the sensitivity of N00N states, for increasing the capacity of a channel or for multiplexing multiple channels into a single one.
The yet unproven Collatz conjecture maintains that repeatedly connecting even numbers n to n/2, and odd n to 3n + 1, connects all natural numbers by a unique root path to the Collatz tree with 1 as its root. The Collatz tree proves to be a Hilbert hotel. Numbers divisible by 2 or 3 depart. An infinite binary tree remains with one upward and one rightward child per number. Rightward numbers, and infinitely many generations of their upward descendants, each with a well-defined root path, depart thereafter. The Collatz tree is a Hilbert hotel because still higher upward descendants keep descending to all unoccupied nodes. The density of already departed numbers comes nevertheless arbitrarily close to 100% of the natural numbers. The latter proves the Collatz conjecture.
A resolution of the quantum measurement problem(s) using the consistent histories interpretation yields in a rather natural way a restriction on what an observer can know about a quantum system, one that is also consistent with some results in quantum information theory. This analysis provides a quantum mechanical understanding of some recent work that shows that certain kinds of quantum behavior are exhibited by a fully classical model if by hypothesis an observers knowledge of its state is appropriately limited.
It is shown that when properly analyzed using principles consistent with the use of a Hilbert space to describe microscopic properties, quantum mechanics is a local theory: one system cannot influence another system with which it does not interact. Claims to the contrary based on quantum violations of Bell inequalities are shown to be incorrect. A specific example traces a violation of the CHSH Bell inequality in the case of a spin-3/2 particle to the noncommutation of certain quantum operators in a situation where (non)locality is not an issue. A consistent histories analysis of what quantum measurements measure, in terms of quantum properties, is used to identify the basic problem with derivations of Bell inequalities: the use of classical concepts (hidden variables) rather than a probabilistic structure appropriate to the quantum domain. A difficulty with the original Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) argument for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics is the use of a counterfactual argument which is not valid if one assumes that Hilbert-space quantum mechanics is complete; locality is not an issue. The quantum correlations that violate Bell inequalities can be understood using local quantum common causes. Wavefunction collapse and Schrodinger steering are calculational procedures, not physical processes. A general Principle of Einstein Locality rules out nonlocal influences between noninteracting quantum systems. Some suggestions are made for changes in terminology that could clarify discussions of quantum foundations and be less confusing to students.
The solution space of many classical optimization problems breaks up into clusters which are extensively distant from one another in the Hamming metric. Here, we show that an analogous quantum clustering phenomenon takes place in the ground state subspace of a certain quantum optimization problem. This involves extending the notion of clustering to Hilbert space, where the classical Hamming distance is not immediately useful. Quantum clusters correspond to macroscopically distinct subspaces of the full quantum ground state space which grow with the system size. We explicitly demonstrate that such clusters arise in the solution space of random quantum satisfiability (3-QSAT) at its satisfiability transition. We estimate both the number of these clusters and their internal entropy. The former are given by the number of hardcore dimer coverings of the core of the interaction graph, while the latter is related to the underconstrained degrees of freedom not touched by the dimers. We additionally provide new numerical evidence suggesting that the 3-QSAT satisfiability transition may coincide with the product satisfiability transition, which would imply the absence of an intermediate entangled satisfiable phase.