No Arabic abstract
Information flow between components of a system takes many forms and is key to understanding the organization and functioning of large-scale, complex systems. We demonstrate three modalities of information flow from time series X to time series Y. Intrinsic information flow exists when the past of X is individually predictive of the present of Y, independent of Ys past; this is most commonly considered information flow. Shared information flow exists when Xs past is predictive of Ys present in the same manner as Ys past; this occurs due to synchronization or common driving, for example. Finally, synergistic information flow occurs when neither Xs nor Ys pasts are predictive of Ys present on their own, but taken together they are. The two most broadly-employed information-theoretic methods of quantifying information flow---time-delayed mutual information and transfer entropy---are both sensitive to a pair of these modalities: time-delayed mutual information to both intrinsic and shared flow, and transfer entropy to both intrinsic and synergistic flow. To quantify each mode individually we introduce our cryptographic flow ansatz, positing that intrinsic flow is synonymous with secret key agreement between X and Y. Based on this, we employ an easily-computed secret-key-agreement bound---intrinsic mutual information&mdashto quantify the three flow modalities in a variety of systems including asymmetric flows and financial markets.
Recent experiments have indicated that many biological systems self-organise near their critical point, which hints at a common design principle. While it has been suggested that information transmission is optimized near the critical point, it remains unclear how information transmission depends on the dynamics of the input signal, the distance over which the information needs to be transmitted, and the distance to the critical point. Here we employ stochastic simulations of a driven 2D Ising system and study the instantaneous mutual information and the information transmission rate between a driven input spin and an output spin. The instantaneous mutual information varies non-monotonically with the temperature, but increases monotonically with the correlation time of the input signal. In contrast, the information transmission rate exhibits a maximum as a function of the input correlation time. Moreover, there exists an optimal temperature that maximizes this maximum information transmission rate. It arises from a tradeoff between the necessity to respond fast to changes in the input so that more information per unit amount of time can be transmitted, and the need to respond to reliably. The optimal temperature lies above the critical point, but moves towards it as the distance between the input and output spin is increased.
The photonic Temporal Mode (TM) represents a possible candidate for the delivery of viable multidimensional quantum communications. However, relative to other multidimensional quantum information carriers such as the Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM), the TM has received less attention. Moreover, in the context of the emerging quantum internet and satellite-based quantum communications, the TM has received no attention. In this work, we remedy this situation by considering the traversal through the satellite-to-Earth channel of single photons encoded in TM space. Our results indicate that for anticipated atmospheric conditions the photonic TM offers a promising avenue for the delivery of high-throughput quantum communications from a satellite to a terrestrial receiver. In particular, we show how these modes can provide for improved multiplexing performance and superior quantum key distribution in the satellite-to-Earth channel, relative to OAM single-photon states. The levels of TM discrimination that guarantee this outcome are outlined and implications of our results for the emerging satellite-based quantum internet are discussed.
Pairwise interactions between individuals are taken as fundamental drivers of collective behavior responsible for group cohesion and decision-making. While an individual directly influences only a few neighbors, over time indirect influences penetrate a much larger group. The abiding question is how this spread of influence comes to affect the collective. One or a few individuals are often identified as leaders, being more influential than others. Transfer entropy and time-delayed mutual information are used to identify underlying asymmetric interactions, such as leader-follower classification in aggregated individuals--cells, birds, fish, and animals. However, these conflate distinct functional modes of information flow between individuals. Computing information measures conditioning on multiple agents requires the proper sampling of a probability distribution whose dimension grows exponentially with the number of agents being conditioned on. Employing simple models of interacting self-propelled particles, we examine the pitfalls of using time-delayed mutual information and transfer entropy to quantify the strength of influence from a leader to a follower. Surprisingly, one must be wary of these pitfalls even for two interacting particles. As an alternative we decompose transfer entropy and time-delayed mutual information into intrinsic, shared, and synergistic modes of information flow. The result not only properly reveals the underlying effective interactions, but also facilitates a more detailed diagnosis of how individual interactions lead to collective behavior. This exposes the role of individual and group memory in collective behaviors. In addition, we demonstrate in a multi-agent system how knowledge of the decomposed information modes between a single pair of agents reveals the nature of many-body interactions without conditioning on additional agents.
In this Thesis, several results in quantum information theory are collected, most of which use entropy as the main mathematical tool. *While a direct generalization of the Shannon entropy to density matrices, the von Neumann entropy behaves differently. A long-standing open question is, whether there are quantum analogues of unconstrained non-Shannon type inequalities. Here, a new constrained non-von-Neumann type inequality is proven, a step towards a conjectured unconstrained inequality by Linden and Winter. *IID quantum state merging can be optimally achieved using the decoupling technique. The one-shot results by Berta et al. and Anshu at al., however, had to bring in additional mathematical machinery. We introduce a natural generalized decoupling paradigm, catalytic decoupling, that can reproduce the aforementioned results when used analogously to the application of standard decoupling in the asymptotic case. *Port based teleportation, a variant of standard quantum teleportation protocol, cannot be implemented perfectly. We prove several lower bounds on the necessary number of output ports N to achieve port based teleportation for given error and input dimension, showing that N diverges uniformly in the dimension of the teleported quantum system, for vanishing error. As a byproduct, a new lower bound for the size of the program register for an approximate universal programmable quantum processor is derived. *In the last part, we give a new definition for information-theoretic quantum non-malleability, strengthening the previous definition by Ambainis et al. We show that quantum non-malleability implies secrecy, analogous to quantum authentication. Furthermore, non-malleable encryption schemes can be used as a primitive to build authenticating encryption schemes. We also show that the strong notion of authentication recently proposed by Garg et al. can be fulfilled using 2-designs.
We study the entropy and information flow in a Maxwell demon device based on a single-electron transistor with controlled gate potentials. We construct the protocols for measuring the charge states and manipulating the gate voltages which minimizes irreversibility for (i) constant input power from the environment or (ii) given energy gain. Charge measurement is modeled by a series of detector readouts for time-dependent gate potentials, and the amount of information obtained is determined. The protocols optimize irreversibility that arises due to (i) enlargement of the configuration space on opening the barriers, and (ii) finite rate of operation. These optimal protocols are general and apply to all systems where barriers between different regions can be manipulated.