# This Video Of Scientists Splitting An Electron Will Shock You

by Jorge Cham.

Ok, this is where things get weird. If quantum computers, femtometer motions or laser alligators weren’t enough, let’s throw in fractionalized electrons, topological surfaces and strings that go to the end of time.

To be honest, the idea that an electron can’t be split hadn’t even occurred to me before my conversation with Gil and Jason. And yet, this goes back to the very essence of the word Quantum: there’s a minimum size to everything. For electrical charge, that minimum is the electron.

Or so we thought! According to my friend, Wikipedia, the discovery of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect in the 1980’s showed that you can form quasi-particles (or “bubbles” as Gil and Jason explain in the video) that carry 1/3 of an electron charge under certain 2D conditions. The 1998 Nobel Prize was awarded for this discovery, although, ironically, they had to split it in three (two for the experimentalists who found it and one for the theorist that explained it).

Typically, I leave a lot out of the final video. The conversation I recorded with Jason and Gil lasted several hours and yet the final product is only five minutes long. One aspect that we talked a lot about but that I did not include in the video above (you watched it already, right?), is the idea of “More is Different”. Here is audio of Jason explaining what it is using birds as an example:

source: we-are-star-stuff.tumblr.com. Click below to hear the audio.

This is the idea of “emergent properties”: that when you combine lots of something together, you don’t just get what’s inside, you get something new. Something different. I think this is a good analogy for IQIM itself, or any such grouping of researchers under one banner. Sure, technically, each person can do great research on their own, but mix them together in one soup and more interesting things can happen that you didn’t expect.

The IQIM Family:

Well, I hope you’ve been enjoying these videos and blog entries. I was going to title this blog post, “The Mysteries Are Just Piling Up” or “Quantum Knots”, but then I looked at the pageviews for all the other blog posts I made:

I guess the title of your blog post matters. So, if this video didn’t shock you, I hope at least it 1/3 shocked you.

Watch the fourth installment of this series:

Jorge Cham is the creator of Piled Higher and Deeper (www.phdcomics.com).

CREDITS:

Featuring: Gil Refael and Jason Alicea
Recorded and animated by Jorge Cham

Funding provided by the National Science Foundation and the Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation.

# Bell’s inequality 50 years later

This is a jubilee year.* In November 1964, John Bell submitted a paper to the obscure (and now defunct) journal Physics. That paper, entitled “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox,” changed how we think about quantum physics.

The paper was about quantum entanglement, the characteristic correlations among parts of a quantum system that are profoundly different than correlations in classical systems. Quantum entanglement had first been explicitly discussed in a 1935 paper by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (hence Bell’s title). Later that same year, the essence of entanglement was nicely and succinctly captured by Schrödinger, who said, “the best possible knowledge of a whole does not necessarily include the best possible knowledge of its parts.” Schrödinger meant that even if we have the most complete knowledge Nature will allow about the state of a highly entangled quantum system, we are still powerless to predict what we’ll see if we look at a small part of the full system. Classical systems aren’t like that — if we know everything about the whole system then we know everything about all the parts as well. I think Schrödinger’s statement is still the best way to explain quantum entanglement in a single vigorous sentence.

To Einstein, quantum entanglement was unsettling, indicating that something is missing from our understanding of the quantum world. Bell proposed thinking about quantum entanglement in a different way, not just as something weird and counter-intuitive, but as a resource that might be employed to perform useful tasks. Bell described a game that can be played by two parties, Alice and Bob. It is a cooperative game, meaning that Alice and Bob are both on the same side, trying to help one another win. In the game, Alice and Bob receive inputs from a referee, and they send outputs to the referee, winning if their outputs are correlated in a particular way which depends on the inputs they receive.

But under the rules of the game, Alice and Bob are not allowed to communicate with one another between when they receive their inputs and when they send their outputs, though they are allowed to use correlated classical bits which might have been distributed to them before the game began. For a particular version of Bell’s game, if Alice and Bob play their best possible strategy then they can win the game with a probability of success no higher than 75%, averaged uniformly over the inputs they could receive. This upper bound on the success probability is Bell’s famous inequality.**

Classical and quantum versions of Bell’s game. If Alice and Bob share entangled qubits rather than classical bits, then they can win the game with a higher success probability.

There is also a quantum version of the game, in which the rules are the same except that Alice and Bob are now permitted to use entangled quantum bits (“qubits”)  which were distributed before the game began. By exploiting their shared entanglement, they can play a better quantum strategy and win the game with a higher success probability, better than 85%. Thus quantum entanglement is a useful resource, enabling Alice and Bob to play the game better than if they shared only classical correlations instead of quantum correlations.

And experimental physicists have been playing the game for decades, winning with a success probability that violates Bell’s inequality. The experiments indicate that quantum correlations really are fundamentally different than, and stronger than, classical correlations.

Why is that such a big deal? Bell showed that a quantum system is more than just a probabilistic classical system, which eventually led to the realization (now widely believed though still not rigorously proven) that accurately predicting the behavior of highly entangled quantum systems is beyond the capacity of ordinary digital computers. Therefore physicists are now striving to scale up the weirdness of the microscopic world to larger and larger scales, eagerly seeking new phenomena and unprecedented technological capabilities.

1964 was a good year. Higgs and others described the Higgs mechanism, Gell-Mann and Zweig proposed the quark model, Penzias and Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background, and I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. Those developments continue to reverberate 50 years later. We’re still looking for evidence of new particle physics beyond the standard model, we’re still trying to unravel the large scale structure of the universe, and I still like listening to the Beatles.

Bell’s legacy is that quantum entanglement is becoming an increasingly pervasive theme of contemporary physics, important not just as the source of a quantum computer’s awesome power, but also as a crucial feature of exotic quantum phases of matter, and even as a vital element of the quantum structure of spacetime itself. 21st century physics will advance not only by probing the short-distance frontier of particle physics and the long-distance frontier of cosmology, but also by exploring the entanglement frontier, by elucidating and exploiting the properties of increasingly complex quantum states.

Sometimes I wonder how the history of physics might have been different if there had been no John Bell. Without Higgs, Brout and Englert and others would have elucidated the spontaneous breakdown of gauge symmetry in 1964. Without Gell-Mann, Zweig could have formulated the quark model. Without Penzias and Wilson, Dicke and collaborators would have discovered the primordial black-body radiation at around the same time.

But it’s not obvious which contemporary of Bell, if any, would have discovered his inequality in Bell’s absence. Not so many good physicists were thinking about quantum entanglement and hidden variables at the time (though David Bohm may have been one notable exception, and his work deeply influenced Bell.) Without Bell, the broader significance of quantum entanglement would have unfolded quite differently and perhaps not until much later. We really owe Bell a great debt.

*I’m stealing the title and opening sentence of this post from Sidney Coleman’s great 1981 lectures on “The magnetic monopole 50 years later.” (I’ve waited a long time for the right opportunity.)

**I’m abusing history somewhat. Bell did not use the language of games, and this particular version of the inequality, which has since been extensively tested in experiments, was derived by Clauser, Horne, Shimony, and Holt in 1969.

# I spy with my little eye…something algebraic.

Look at this picture.

Does any part of it surprise you? Look more closely.

Now? Try crossing your eyes.

Do you see a boy’s name?

I spell “Peter” with two e’s, but “Piotr” and “Pyotr” appear as authors’ names in papers’ headers. Finding “Petr” in a paper shouldn’t have startled me. But how often does “Gretchen” or “Amadeus” materialize in an equation?

When I was little, my reading list included Eye Spy, Where’s Waldo?, and Puzzle Castle. The books teach children to pay attention, notice details, and evaluate ambiguities.

That’s what physicists do. The first time I saw the picture above, I saw a variation on “Peter.” I was reading (when do I not?) about the intersection of quantum information and thermodynamics. The authors were discussing heat and algebra, not saints or boys who picked pecks of pickled peppers. So I looked more closely.

Each letter resolved into part of a story about a physical system. The P represents a projector. A projector is a mathematical object that narrows one’s focus to a particular space, as blinders on a horse do. The E tells us which space to focus on: a space associated with an amount E of energy, like a country associated with a GDP of \$500 billion.

Some of the energy E belongs to a heat reservoir. We know so because “reservoir” begins with r, and R appears in the picture. A heat reservoir is a system, like a colossal bathtub, whose temperature remains constant. The Greek letter $\tau$, pronounced “tau,” represents the reservoir’s state. The reservoir occupies an equilibrium state: The bath’s large-scale properties—its average energy, volume, etc.—remain constant. Never mind about jacuzzis.

Piecing together the letters, we interpret the picture as follows: Imagine a vast, constant-temperature bathtub (R). Suppose we shut the tap long enough ago that the water in the tub has calmed ($\tau$). Suppose the tub neighbors a smaller system—say, a glass of Perrier.* Imagine measuring how much energy the bath-and-Perrier composite contains (P). Our measurement device reports the number E.

Quite a story to pack into five letters. Didn’t Peter deserve a second glance?

The equation’s right-hand side forms another story. I haven’t seen Peters on that side, nor Poseidons nor Gallahads. But look closely, and you will find a story.

The images above appear in “Fundamental limitations for quantum and nanoscale thermodynamics,” published by Michał Horodecki and Jonathan Oppenheim in Nature Communications in 2013.

*Experts: The ρS that appears in the first two images represents the smaller system. The tensor product represents the reservoir-and-smaller-system composite.

# The Science that made Stephen Hawking famous

In anticipation of The Theory of Everything which comes out today, and in the spirit of continuing with Quantum Frontiers’ current movie theme, I wanted to provide an overview of Stephen Hawking’s pathbreaking research. Or at least to the best of my ability—not every blogger on this site has won bets against Hawking! In particular, I want to describe Hawking’s work during the late ‘60s and through the ’70s. His work during the ’60s is the backdrop for this movie and his work during the ’70s revolutionized our understanding of black holes.

(Portrait of Stephen Hawking outside the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge. Credit: Jason Bye)

As additional context, this movie is coming out at a fascinating time, at a time when Hawking’s contributions appear more prescient and important than ever before. I’m alluding to the firewall paradox, which is the modern reincarnation of the information paradox (which will be discussed below), and which this blog has discussed multiple times. Progress through paradox is an important motto in physics and Hawking has been at the center of arguably the most challenging paradox of the past half century. I should also mention that despite irresponsible journalism in response to Hawking’s “there are no black holes” comment back in January, that there is extremely solid evidence that black holes do in fact exist. Hawking was referring to a technical distinction concerning the horizon/boundary of black holes.

Now let’s jump back and imagine that we are all young graduate students at Cambridge in the early ‘60s. Our protagonist, a young Hawking, had recently been diagnosed with ALS, he had recently met Jane Wilde and he was looking for a thesis topic. This was an exciting time for Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity (GR). The gravitational redshift had recently been confirmed by Pound and Rebka at Harvard, which put the theory on extremely solid footing. This was the third of three “classical tests of GR.” So now that everyone was truly convinced that GR is correct, it became important to get serious about investigating its most bizarre predictions. Hawking and Penrose picked up on this theme most notably.The mathematics of GR allows for singularities which lead to things like the big bang and black holes. This mathematical possibility was known since the works of Friedmann, Lemaitre and Oppenheimer+Snyder starting all the way back in the 1920s, but these calculations involved unphysical assumptions—usually involving unrealistic symmetries. Hawking and Penrose each asked (and answered) the questions: how robust and generic are these mathematical singularities? Will they persist even if we get rid of assumptions like perfect spherical symmetry of matter? What is their interpretation in physics?

I know that I have now used the word “singularity” multiple times without defining it. However, this is for good reason—it’s very hard to assign a precise definition to the term! Some examples of singularities include regions of “infinite curvature” or with “conical deficits.”

Singularity theorems applied to cosmology: Hawking’s first major results, starting with his thesis in 1965, was proving that singularities on the cosmological scale—such as the big bang—were indeed generic phenomena and not just mathematical artifacts. This work was published immediately after, and it built upon, a seminal paper by Penrose. Also, I apologize for copping-out again, but it’s outside the scope of this post to say more about the big bang, but as a rough heuristic, imagine that if you run time backwards then you obtain regions of infinite density. Hawking and Penrose spent the next five or so years stripping away as many assumptions as they could until they were left with rather general singularity theorems. Essentially, they used MATH to say something exceptionally profound about THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE! Namely that if you start with any solution to Einstein’s equations which is consistent with our observed universe, and run the solution backwards, then you will obtain singularities (regions of infinite density at the Big Bang in this case)! However, I should mention that despite being a revolutionary leap in our understanding of cosmology, this isn’t the end of the story, and that Hawking has also pioneered an attempt to understand what happens when you add quantum effects to the mix. This is still a very active area of research.

Singularity theorems applied to black holes: the first convincing evidence for the existence of astrophysical black holes didn’t come until 1972 with the discovery of Cygnus X-1, and even this discovery was wrought with controversy. So imagine yourself as Hawking back in the late ’60s. He and Penrose had this powerful machinery which they had successfully applied to better understand THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE but there was still a question about whether or not black holes actually existed in nature (not just in mathematical fantasy land.) In the very late ‘60s and early ’70s, Hawking, Penrose, Carter and others convincingly argued that black holes should exist. Again, they used math to say something about how the most bizarre corners of the universe should behave–and then black holes were discovered observationally a few years later. Math for the win!

No hair theorem: after convincing himself that black holes exist Hawking continued his theoretical studies about their strange properties. In the early ’70s, Hawking, Carter, Israel and Robinson proved a very deep and surprising conjecture of John Wheeler–that black holes have no hair! This name isn’t the most descriptive but it’s certainly provocative. More specifically they showed that only a short time after forming, a black hole is completely described by only a few pieces of data: knowledge of its position, mass, charge, angular momentum and linear momentum (X, M, Q, J and L). It only takes a few dozen numbers to describe an exceptionally complicated object. Contrast this to, for example, 1000 dust particles where you would need tens of thousands of datum (the position and momentum of each particle, their charge, their mass, etc.) This is crazy, the number of degrees of freedom seems to decrease as objects form into black holes?

Black hole thermodynamics: around the same time, Carter, Hawking and Bardeen proved a result similar to the second law of thermodynamics (it’s debatable how realistic their assumptions are.) Recall that this is the law where “the entropy in a closed system only increases.” Hawking showed that, if only GR is taken into account, then the area of a black holes’ horizon only increases. This includes that if two black holes with areas $A_1$ and $A_2$ merge then the new area $A*$ will be bigger than the sum of the original areas $A_1+A_2$.

Combining this with the no hair theorem led to a fascinating exploration of a connection between thermodynamics and black holes. Recall that thermodynamics was mainly worked out in the 1800s and it is very much a “classical theory”–one that didn’t involve either quantum mechanics or general relativity. The study of thermodynamics resulted in the thrilling realization that it could be summarized by four laws. Hawking and friends took the black hole connection seriously and conjectured that there would also be four laws of black hole mechanics.

In my opinion, the most interesting results came from trying to understand the entropy of black hole. The entropy is usually the logarithm of the number of possible states consistent with observed ‘large scale quantities’. Take the ocean for example, the entropy is humungous. There are an unbelievable number of small changes that could be made (imagine the number of ways of swapping the location of a water molecule and a grain of sand) which would be consistent with its large scale properties like it’s temperature. However, because of the no hair theorem, it appears that the entropy of a black hole is very small? What happens when some matter with a large amount of entropy falls into a black hole? Does this lead to a violation of the second law of thermodynamics? No! It leads to a generalization! Bekenstein, Hawking and others showed that there are two contributions to the entropy in the universe: the standard 1800s version of entropy associated to matter configurations, but also contributions proportional to the area of black hole horizons. When you add all of these up, a new “generalized second law of thermodynamics” emerges. Continuing to take this thermodynamic argument seriously (dE=TdS specifically), it appeared that black holes have a temperature!

As a quick aside, a deep and interesting question is what degrees of freedom contribute to this black hole entropy? In the late ’90s Strominger and Vafa made exceptional progress towards answering this question when he showed that in certain settings, the number of microstates coming from string theory exactly reproduces the correct black hole entropy.

Black holes evaporate (Hawking Radiation): again, continuing to take this thermodynamic connection seriously, if black holes have a temperature then they should radiate away energy. But what is the mechanism behind this? This is when Hawking fearlessly embarked on one of the most heroic calculations of the 20th century in which he slogged through extremely technical calculations involving “quantum mechanics in a curved space” and showed that after superimposing quantum effects on top of general relativity, there is a mechanism for particles to escape from a black hole.

This is obviously a hard thing to describe, but for a hack-job analogy, imagine you have a hot plate in a cool room. Somehow the plate “radiates” away its energy until it has the same temperature as the room. How does it do this? By definition, the reason why a plate is hot, is because its molecules are jiggling around rapidly. At the boundary of the plate, sometimes a slow moving air molecule (lower temperature) gets whacked by a molecule in the plate and leaves with a higher momentum than it started with, and in return the corresponding molecule in the plate loses energy. After this happens an enormous number of times, the temperatures equilibrate. In the context of black holes, these boundary interactions would never happen without quantum mechanics. General relativity predicts that anything inside the event horizon is causally disconnected from anything on the outside and that’s that. However, if you take quantum effects into account, then for some very technical reasons, energy can be exchanged at the horizon (interface between the “inside” and “outside” of the black hole.)

Black hole information paradox: but wait, there’s more! These calculations weren’t done using a completely accurate theory of nature (we use the phrase “quantum gravity” as a placeholder for whatever this theory will one day be.) They were done using some nightmarish amalgamation of GR and quantum mechanics. Seminal thought experiments by Hawking led to different predictions depending upon which theory one trusted more: GR or quantum mechanics. Most famously, the information paradox considered what would happen if an “encyclopedia” were thrown into the black hole. GR predicts that after the black hole has fully evaporated, such that only empty space is left behind, that the “information” contained within this encyclopedia would be destroyed. (To readers who know quantum mechanics, replace “encylopedia” with “pure state”.) This prediction unacceptably violates the assumptions of quantum mechanics, which predict that the information contained within the encyclopedia will never be destroyed. (Maybe imagine you enclosed the black hole with perfect sensing technology and measured every photon that came out of the black hole. In principle, according to quantum mechanics, you should be able to reconstruct what was initially thrown into the black hole.)

Making all of this more rigorous: Hawking spent most of the rest of the ’70s making all of this more rigorous and stripping away assumptions. One particularly otherworldly and powerful tool involved redoing many of these black hole calculations using the euclidean path integral formalism.

I’m certain that I missed some key contributions and collaborators in this short history, and I sincerely apologize for that. However, I hope that after reading this you have a deepened appreciation for how productive Hawking was during this period. He was one of humanity’s earliest pioneers into the uncharted territory that we call quantum gravity. And he has inspired at least a few generations worth of theoretical physicists, obviously, including myself.

In addition to reading many of Hawking’s original papers, an extremely fun source for this post is a book which was published after his 60th birthday conference.

# When I met with Steven Spielberg to talk about Interstellar

Today I had the awesome and eagerly anticipated privilege of attending a screening of the new film Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan. One can’t help but be impressed by Nolan’s fertile visual imagination. But you should know that Caltech’s own Kip Thorne also had a vital role in this project. Indeed, were there no Kip Thorne, Interstellar would never have happened.

On June 2, 2006, I participated in an unusual one-day meeting at Caltech, organized by Kip and the movie producer Lynda Obst (Sleepless in Seattle, Contact, The Invention of Lying, …). Lynda and Kip, who have been close since being introduced by their mutual friend Carl Sagan decades ago, had conceived a movie project together, and had collaborated on a “treatment” outlining the story idea. The treatment adhered to a core principle that was very important to Kip — that the movie be scientifically accurate. Though the story indulged in some wild speculations, at Kip’s insistence it skirted away from any flagrant violation of the firmly established laws of Nature. This principle of scientifically constrained speculation intrigued Steven Spielberg, who was interested in directing.

The purpose of the meeting was to brainstorm about the story and the science behind it with Spielberg, Obst, and Thorne. A remarkable group assembled, including physicists (Andrei Linde, Lisa Randall, Savas Dimopoulos, Mark Wise, as well as Kip), astrobiologists (Frank Drake, David Grinspoon), planetary scientists (Alan Boss, John Spencer, Dave Stevenson), and psychologists (Jay Buckey, James Carter, David Musson). As we all chatted and got acquainted, I couldn’t help but feel that we were taking part in the opening scene of a movie about making a movie. Spielberg came late and left early, but spent about three hours with us; he even brought along his Dad (an engineer).

Though the official release of Interstellar is still a few days away, you may already know from numerous media reports (including the cover story in this week’s Time Magazine) the essential elements of the story, which involves traveling through a wormhole seeking a new planet for humankind, a replacement for the hopelessly ravaged earth. The narrative evolved substantially as the project progressed, but traveling through a wormhole to visit a distant planet was already central to the original story.

Inevitably, some elements of the Obst/Thorne treatment did not survive in the final film. For one, Stephen Hawking was a prominent character in the original story; he joined the mission because of his unparalleled expertise at wormhole transversal, and Stephen’s ALS symptoms eased during prolonged weightlessness, only to recur upon return to earth gravity. Also, gravitational waves played a big part in the treatment; in particular the opening scene depicted LIGO scientists discovering the wormhole by detecting the gravitational waves emanating from it.

There was plenty to discuss to fill our one-day workshop, including: the rocket technology needed for the trip, the strong but stretchy materials that would allow the ship to pass through the wormhole without being torn apart by tidal gravity, how to select a crew psychologically fit for such a dangerous mission, what exotic life forms might be found on other worlds, how to communicate with an advanced civilization which resides in a higher dimensional bulk rather than the three-dimensional brane to which we’re confined, how to build a wormhole that stays open rather than pinching off and crushing those who attempt to pass through, and whether a wormhole could enable travel backward in time.

Spielberg was quite engaged in our discussions. Upon his arrival I immediately shot off a text to my daughter Carina: “Steven Spielberg is wearing a Brown University cap!” (Carina was a Brown student at the time, as Spielberg’s daughter had been.) Steven assured us of his keen interest in the project, noting wryly that “Aliens have been very good to me,” and he mentioned some of his favorite space movies, which included some I had also enjoyed as a kid, like Forbidden Planet and (the original) The Day the Earth Stood Still. In one notable moment, Spielberg asked the group “Who believes that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe?” We all raised our hands. “And who believes that the earth has been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations?” No one raised a hand. Steven seemed struck by our unanimity, on both questions.

I remember tentatively suggesting that the extraterrestrials had mastered M-theory, thus attaining computational power far beyond the comprehension of earthlings, and that they themselves were really advanced robots, constructed by an earlier generation of computers. Like many of the fun story ideas floated that day, this one had no apparent impact on the final version of the film.

Spielberg later brought in Jonah Nolan to write the screenplay. When Spielberg had to abandon the project because his DreamWorks production company broke up with Paramount Pictures (which owned the story), Jonah’s brother Chris Nolan eventually took over the project. Jonah and Chris Nolan transformed the story, but continued to consult extensively with Kip, who became an Executive Producer and says he is pleased with the final result.

Of the many recent articles about Interstellar, one of the most interesting is this one in Wired by Adam Rogers, which describes how Kip worked closely with the visual effects team at Double Negative to ensure that wormholes and rapidly rotating black holes are accurately depicted in the film (though liberties were taken to avoid confusing the audience). The images produced by sophisticated ray tracing computations were so surprising that at first Kip thought there must be a bug in the software, though eventually he accepted that the calculations are correct, and he is still working hard to more fully understand the results.

I can’t give away the ending of the movie, but I can safely say this: When it’s over you’re going to have a lot of questions. Fortunately for all of us, Kip’s book The Science of Interstellar will be available the same day the movie goes into wide release (November 7), so we’ll all know where to seek enlightenment.

In fact on that very same day we’ll be treated to the release of The Theory of Everything, a biopic about Stephen and Jane Hawking. So November 7 is going to be an unforgettable Black Hole Day. Enjoy!

# Generally speaking

My high-school calculus teacher had a mustache like a walrus’s and shoulders like a rower’s. At 8:05 AM, he would demand my class’s questions about our homework. Students would yawn, and someone’s hand would drift into the air.

“I have a general question,” the hand’s owner would begin.

“Only private questions from you,” my teacher would snap. “You’ll be a general someday, but you’re not a colonel, or even a captain, yet.”

Then his eyes would twinkle; his voice would soften; and, after the student asked the question, his answer would epitomize why I’ve chosen a life in which I use calculus more often than laundry detergent.

Many times though I witnessed the “general” trap, I fell into it once. Little wonder: I relish generalization as other people relish hiking or painting or Michelin-worthy relish. When inferring general principles from examples, I abstract away details as though they’re tomato stains. My veneration of generalization led me to quantum information (QI) theory. One abstract theory can model many physical systems: electrons, superconductors, ion traps, etc.

Little wonder that generalizing a QI model swallowed my summer.

QI has shed light on statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which describe energy, information, and efficiency. Models called resource theories describe small systems’ energies, information, and efficiencies. Resource theories help us calculate a quantum system’s value—what you can and can’t create from a quantum system—if you can manipulate systems in only certain ways.

Suppose you can perform only operations that preserve energy. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, systems evolve toward equilibrium. Equilibrium amounts roughly to stasis: Averages of properties like energy remain constant.

Out-of-equilibrium systems have value because you can suck energy from them to power laundry machines. How much energy can you draw, on average, from a system in a constant-temperature environment? Technically: How much “work” can you draw? We denote this average work by < W >. According to thermodynamics, < W > equals the change ∆F in the system’s Helmholtz free energy. The Helmholtz free energy is a thermodynamic property similar to the energy stored in a coiled spring.

One reason to study thermodynamics?

Suppose you want to calculate more than the average extractable work. How much work will you probably extract during some particular trial? Though statistical physics offers no answer, resource theories do. One answer derived from resource theories resembles ∆F mathematically but involves one-shot information theory, which I’ve discussed elsewhere.

If you average this one-shot extractable work, you recover < W > = ∆F. “Helmholtz” resource theories recapitulate statistical-physics results while offering new insights about single trials.

Helmholtz resource theories sit atop a silver-tasseled pillow in my heart. Why not, I thought, spread the joy to the rest of statistical physics? Why not generalize thermodynamic resource theories?

The average work <W > extractable equals ∆F if heat can leak into your system. If heat and particles can leak, <W > equals the change in your system’s grand potential. The grand potential, like the Helmholtz free energy, is a free energy that resembles the energy in a coiled spring. The grand potential characterizes Bose-Einstein condensates, low-energy quantum systems that may have applications to metrology and quantum computation. If your system responds to a magnetic field, or has mass and occupies a gravitational field, or has other properties, <W > equals the change in another free energy.

A collaborator and I designed resource theories that describe heat-and-particle exchanges. In our paper “Beyond heat baths: Generalized resource theories for small-scale thermodynamics,” we propose that different thermodynamic resource theories correspond to different interactions, environments, and free energies. I detailed the proposal in “Beyond heat baths II: Framework for generalized thermodynamic resource theories.”

“II” generalizes enough to satisfy my craving for patterns and universals. “II” generalizes enough to merit a hand-slap of a pun from my calculus teacher. We can test abstract theories only by applying them to specific systems. If thermodynamic resource theories describe situations as diverse as heat-and-particle exchanges, magnetic fields, and polymers, some specific system should shed light on resource theories’ accuracy.

If you find such a system, let me know. Much as generalization pleases aesthetically, the detergent is in the details.

# Apply to join IQIM!

Editor’s Note: Dr. Chandni Usha is an IQIM postdoctoral scholar working with Prof. Eisenstein. We asked her to describe her experience as an IQIM fellow.

Just another day at work!

When I look back at how I ended up here, I find myself in a couple of metastable states. Every state pushed me to newer avenues of knowledge. Interestingly, growing up I never really knew what it was like to be a scientist. I had not watched any of those sci-fi movies or related TV series as a kid. No outreach program ever reached me in my years of schooling! My first career choice was to be a lawyer. But a casual comment by a friend that lawyers are ‘liars’ was strong enough to change my mind. Strangely enough, now the quest is for the truth, in a lab down at the sub-basement of one of the world’s best research institutes.

I did my masters in Physics at this beautiful place called the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. I realized that I like doing things with my hands. Fixing broken instruments seemed fun. Every new data point on a plot amused me. It was more than obvious that experimental physics is where my heart was and hence I went on to do a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics. When I decided to apply for postdoctoral positions, an old friend of mine, Debaleena Nandi, told me to look up the IQIM website. That was in November 2012, and I applied for the IQIM postdoctoral fellowship. My stars were probably aligned to be here. Coincidentally, Jim Eisenstein, my adviser, was in India on a sabbatical and I happened to hear him give a talk. It left such a strong impression in my mind that I was willing to give up on a trip to Europe for an interview the next day had he offered me a position. We spoke about possible problems, but no offer was in sight and hence I did travel to Europe with my mind already at Caltech. IQIM saved me from my dilemma when they offered me the fellowship a few days later.

Now, why choose IQIM! Reason number one was Jim. And reason number two was this blog which brought in this feeling that there exists a community here; where experimentalists and theorists could share their ideas and grow together in a symbiotic manner. My first project was with an earlier postdoc, Erik Henriksen, who is now a faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. It was based on a proposal by fellow IQIM professor Jason Alicea which involved decorating a film of graphene with a certain heavy metal adatom. Jason’s prediction was that if you choose the right adatom, it could endow some of its unique properties such as strong spin-orbit coupling to the underlying graphene sheet. One can thus engineer graphene to what is called a topological insulator where only the edges of the graphene sheet conduct. Erik had taken on this task and I tagged along. Working in a very small campus with a close-knit community helps bounce your ideas around others and that’s how this experiment came into being. I found it particularly interesting that Jason and his colleagues often ask us, the experimentalists, whether some of the ideas they have are actually feasible to be performed in a lab!

The IQIM fellowship allows you to work on a variety of fields that come under the common theme of quantum information and matter. In addition to providing an independent funding and research grant, the fellowship offers the flexibility to work with any mentor and even multiple mentors, especially in the theory group. In experimental groups however, that flexibility is limited but not impossible. The fellowship gives you a lot of freedom and encourages collaborations. IQIM theory folks have a very strong and friendly group with a lot of collaborations, to the extent that it is often hard to distinguish the faculty from the postdocs and students.

Apart from a yearly retreat to a beautiful resort in Lake Arrowhead, the social life at IQIM is further enhanced through the Friday seminars where you get to hear about the work from postdocs and graduate students from IQIM, as well as other universities. IQIM’s outreach activities have been outstanding. A quick look at this blog will take you from the PhD Comics animations, to teaching kids quantum mechanics through Miinecraft, to hosting middle school students at the InnoWorks academy and a host of other activities. This note will not be complete without mentioning about our repeated efforts to attract women candidates. My husband lives in India, and I live right across the globe, all for the love of science. I am not alone in this respect as we have two more women postdocs at IQIM who have similar stories to tell. So, if you are a woman and wish to pursue a quality research program, this is the place to be, for together we can bring change.

Now that I have convinced you that IQIM is something not to be missed, kindly spread the word. And if you are looking for an awesome opportunity to work at Caltech, get your CV and research statement and apply for the fellowships before Dec 5, 2014!