No Arabic abstract
We study a mechanical system that was considered by Boltzmann in 1868 in the context of the derivation of the canonical and microcanonical ensembles. This system was introduced as an example of ergodic dynamics, which was central to Boltzmanns derivation. It consists of a single particle in two dimensions, which is subjected to a gravitational attraction to a fixed center. In addition, an infinite plane is fixed at some finite distance from the center, which acts as a hard wall on which the particle collides elastically. Finally, an extra centrifugal force is added. We will show that, in the absence of this extra centrifugal force, there are two independent integrals of motion. Therefore the extra centrifugal force is necessary for Boltzmanns claim of ergodicity to hold.
We show that the time evolution of an open quantum system, described by a possibly time dependent Liouvillian, can be simulated by a unitary quantum circuit of a size scaling polynomially in the simulation time and the size of the system. An immediate consequence is that dissipative quantum computing is no more powerful than the unitary circuit model. Our result can be seen as a dissipative Church-Turing theorem, since it implies that under natural assumptions, such as weak coupling to an environment, the dynamics of an open quantum system can be simulated efficiently on a quantum computer. Formally, we introduce a Trotter decomposition for Liouvillian dynamics and give explicit error bounds. This constitutes a practical tool for numerical simulations, e.g., using matrix-product operators. We also demonstrate that most quantum states cannot be prepared efficiently.
An emended and improved version of the present paper has been archived in math-ph/0505057, and a preliminary account of its content has been published in Phys.Rev.Lett. 92, 60601, (2004). Moreover, in order to prove the relevance of topology for phase transition phenomena in a broad domain of physically interesting cases, we have proved another theorem which is reported in math-ph/0505058 and which is crucially based on the result of the paper archived in math-ph/0505057.
The KAM iterative scheme turns out to be effective in many problems arising in perturbation theory. I propose an abstract version of the KAM theorem to gather these different results.
In this paper, a decomposition theorem for (covariant) unitary group representations on Kaplansky-Hilbert modules over Stone algebras is established, which generalizes the well-known Hilbert space case (where it coincides with the decomposition of Jacobs, de Leeuw and Glicksberg). The proof rests heavily on the operator theory on Kaplansky-Hilbert modules, in particular the spectral theorem for Hilbert-Schmidt homomorphisms on such modules. As an application, a generalization of the celebrated Furstenberg-Zimmer structure theorem to the case of measure-preserving actions of arbitrary groups on arbitrary probability spaces is established.
For strictly ergodic systems, we introduce the class of CF-Nil($k$) systems: systems for which the maximal measurable and maximal topological $k$-step pronilfactors coincide as measure-preserving systems. Weiss theorem implies that such systems are abundant in a precise sense. We show that the CF-Nil($k$) systems are precisely the class of minimal systems for which the $k$-step nilsequence version of the Wiener-Wintner average converges everywhere. As part of the proof we establish that pronilsystems are $coalescent$. In addition, we characterize a CF-Nil($k$) system in terms of its $(k+1)$-$th dynamical cubespace$. In particular, for $k=1$, this provides for strictly ergodic systems a new condition equivalent to the property that every measurable eigenfunction has a continuous version.