# The world of hackers and secrets

I’m Evgeny Mozgunov, and some of you may remember my earlier posts on Quantum Frontiers. I’ve recently graduated with a PhD after 6 years in the quantum information group at Caltech. As I’m navigating the job market in quantum physics, it was only a matter of time before I got dragged into a race between startups. Those who can promise impressive quantum speedups for practical tasks get a lot of money from venture capitalists. Maybe there’s something about my mind and getting paid: when I’m paid to do something, I suddenly start coming up with solutions that never occurred to me while I was wandering around as a student. And this time, I’ve noticed a possibility of impressing the public with quantum speedups that nobody has ever used before.

Three former members of John Preskill’s group, Gorjan Alagic, Stacey Jeffery and Stephen Jordan, have already proposed this idea (Circuit Obfuscation Using Braids, p.10), but none of the startups seems to have picked it up. You only need a small quantum computer. Imagine you are in the audience. I ask you to come up with a number. Don’t tell it out loud: instead, write it on a secret piece of paper, and take a little time to do a few mathematical operations based on the number. Then announce the result of those operations. Once you are done, people will automatically be split into two categories. Those with access to a small quantum computer (like the one at IBM) will be able to put on a magic hat (the computer…) and recover your number. But the rest of the audience will be left in awe, with no clue as to how this is even possible. There’s nothing they could do to guess your number based only on the result you announced, unless you’re willing to wait for a few days and they have access to the world’s supercomputing powers.

So far I’ve described the general setting of encryption – a cipher is announced, the key to the cipher is destroyed, and only those who can break the code can decipher.  For instance, if RSA encryption is used for the magic show above, indeed only people with a big quantum computer will be able to recover the secret number. To complete my story, I need to describe what the result that you announce (the cipher) looks like:

A sequence of instructions for a small quantum computer that is equivalent to a simple instruction for spitting out your number. However, the announced sequence of instructions is obfuscated, such that you can’t just read off the number from it.

You really need to feed the sequence into a quantum computer, and see what it outputs. Obfuscation is more general than encryption, but here we’re going to use it as a method of encryption.

Alagic et al. taught us how to do something called obfuscation by compiling for a quantum computer: much like when you compile a .c file in your CS class, you can’t really understand the .out file. Of course you can just execute the .out file, but not if it describes a quantum circuit, unless you have access to a quantum computer. The proposed classical compiler turns either a classical or a quantum algorithm into a hard-to-read quantum circuit that looks like braids. Unfortunately, any obfuscation by compiling scheme has the problem that whoever understands the compiler well enough will be able to actually read the .out file (or notice a pattern in braids reduced to a compact “normal” form), and guess your number without resorting to a quantum computer. Surprisingly, even though Alagic et al.’s scheme doesn’t claim any protection under this attack, it still satisfies one of the theoretical definitions of obfuscation: if two people write two different sets of instructions to perform the same operation, and then each obfuscate their own set of instructions by a restricted set of tricks, then it should be impossible to tell from the end result which program was obtained by whom.

Theoretical obfuscation can be illustrated by these video game Nier cosplayers: when they put on their wig and blindfold, they look like the same person. The character named 2B is an android, whose body is disposable, and whose mind is a set of instructions stored on a server. Other characters try to hack her mind as the story progresses.

Quantum scientists can have their own little world of hackers and secrets, organized in the following way: some researchers present their obfuscated code outputting a secret message, and other researchers become hackers trying to break it. Thanks to another result by Alagic et al, we know that hard-to-break obfuscated circuits secure against classical computers exist. But we don’t know how the obfuscator that produces those worst-case instances reliably looks like, so a bit of crowdsourcing to find it is in order. It’s a free-for-all, where all tools and tricks are allowed. In fact, even you can enter! All you need to know is a universal gate set H,T = R(π/4),CNOT and good old matrix multiplication. Come up with a product of these matrices that multiplies to a bunch of X‘s (X=HT⁴H), but such that only you know on which qubits the X are applied. This code will spit out your secret bitstring on an input of all 0’es. Publish it and wait until some hacker breaks it!

Here’s mine, can anyone see what’s my secret bitstring?

One can run it on a 5 qubit quantum computer in less than 1ms. But if you try to multiply the corresponding 32×32 matrices on your laptop, it takes more than 1ms. Quantum speedup right there. Of course I didn’t prove that there’s no better way of finding out my secret than multiplying matrices. In fact, had I used only even powers of the matrix T in the picture above, then there is a classical algorithm available in open source (Aaronson, Gottesman) that recovers the number without having to multiply large matrices.

I’m in luck: startups and venture capitalists never cared about theoretical proofs, it only has to work until it fails. I think they should give millions to me instead of D-wave. Seriously, there’s plenty of applications for practical obfuscation, besides magic shows. One can set up a social network where posts are gibberish except for those who have a quantum computer (that would be a good conspiracy theory some years from now). One can verify when a private company claims to sell a small quantum computer.

I’d like to end on a more general note: small quantum computers are already faster than classical hardware at multiplying certain kinds of matrices. This has already been proven for a restricted class of quantum computers and a task called boson sampling. If there’s a competition in matrix multiplication somewhere in the world, we can already win.

# The entangled fabric of space

We live in the information revolution. We translate everything into vast sequences of ones and zeroes. From our personal email to our work documents, from our heart rates to our credit rates, from our preferred movies to our movie preferences, all things information are represented using this minimal {0,1} alphabet which our digital helpers “understand” and process. Many of us physicists are now taking this information revolution at heart and embracing the “It from qubit” motto. Our dream: to understand space, time and gravity as emergent features in a world made of information – quantum information.

Over the past two years, I have been obsessively trying to understand this profound perspective more rigorously. Recently, John Preskill and I have taken a further step in this direction in the recent paper: quantum code properties from holographic geometries. In it, we make progress in interpreting features of the holographic approach to quantum gravity in the terms of quantum information constructs.

In this post I would like to present some context for this work through analogies which hopefully help intuitively convey the general ideas. While still containing some technical content, this post is not likely to satisfy those readers seeking a precise in-depth presentation. To you I can only recommend the masterfully delivered lecture notes on gravity and entanglement by Mark Van Raamsdonk.

## Entanglement as a cat’s cradle

A cat’s cradle serves as a crude metaphor for quantum mechanical entanglement. The full image provides a complete description of the string and how it is laced in a stable configuration around the two hands. However, this lacing does not describe a stable configuration of half the string on one hand. The string would become disentangled and fall if we were to suddenly remove one of the hands or cut through the middle.

Of all the concepts needed to explain emergent spacetime, maybe the most difficult is that of quantum entanglement. While the word seems to convey some kind of string wound up in a complicated way, it is actually a quality which may describe information in quantum mechanical systems. In particular, it applies to a system for which we have a complete description as a whole, but are only capable of describing certain statistical properties of its parts. In other words, our knowledge of the whole loses predictive power when we are only concerned with the parts. Entanglement entropy is a measure of information which quantifies this.

While our metaphor for entanglement is quite crude, it will serve the purpose of this post. Namely, to illustrate one of the driving premises for the holographic approach to quantum gravity, that the very structure of spacetime is emergent and built up from entanglement entropy.

## Knit and crochet your way into the manifolds

But let us bring back our metaphors and try to convey the content of this identification. For this, we resort to the unlikely worlds of knitting and crochet. Indeed, by a planned combination of individual loops and stitches, these traditional crafts are capable of approximating any kind of surface (2D Riemannian surface would be the technical term).

Here I have presented some examples with uniform curvature R: flat in green, positive curvature (ball) in yellow and negative curvature (coral reef) in purple. While actual practitioners may be more interested in getting the shape right on hats and socks for loved ones, for us the point is that if we take a step back, these objects built of simple loops, hooks and stitches could end up looking a lot like the smooth surfaces that a physicist might like to use to describe 2D space. This is cute, but can we push this metaphor even further?

Well, first of all, although the pictures above are only representing 2D surfaces, we can expect that a similar approach should allow approximating 3D and even higher dimensional objects (again the technical term is Riemannian manifolds). It would just make things much harder to present in a picture. These woolen structures are, in fact, quite reminiscent of tensor networks, a modern mathematical construct widely used in the field of quantum information. There too, we combine basic building blocks (tensors) through simple operations (tensor index contraction) to build a more complex composite object. In the tensor network world, the structure of the network (how its nodes are connected to other nodes) generically defines the entanglement structure of the resulting object.

This regular tensor network layout was used to describe hyperbolic space which is similar to the purple crochet. However, they apriori look quite dissimilar due to the use of the Poincaré disk model where tensors further from the center look smaller. Another difference is that the high degree of regularity is achieved at the expense of having very few tensors per curvature radius (as compared to its purple crochet cousin). However, planarity and regularity don’t seem to be essential so the crochet probably provides a better intuitive picture.

Roughly speaking, tensor networks are ingenious ways of encoding (quantum) inputs into (quantum) outputs. In particular, if you enter some input at the boundary of your tensor network, the tensors do the work of processing that information throughout the network so that if you ask for an output at any one of the nodes in the bulk of the tensor network, you get the right encoded answer. In other words, the information we input into the tensor network begins its journey at the dangling edges found at the boundary of the network and travels through the bulk edges by exploiting them as information bridges between the nodes of the network.

In the figure representing the cat’s cradle, these dangling input edges can be though of as the fingers holding the wool. Now, if we partition these edges into two disjoint sets (say, the fingers on the left hand and the fingers on the right hand, respectively), there will be some amount of entanglement between them. How much? In general, we cannot say, but under certain assumptions we find that it is proportional to the minimum cut through the network. Imagine you had an incredible number of fingers holding your wool structure. Now separate these fingers arbitrarily into two subsets L and R (we may call them left hand and right hand, although there is nothing right or left handy about them). By pulling left hand and right hand apart, the wool might stretch until at some point it breaks. How many threads will break? Well, the question is analogous to the entanglement one. We might expect, however, that a minimal number of threads break such that each hand can go its own way. This is what we call the minimal cut. In tensor networks, entanglement entropy is always bounded above by such a minimal cut and it has been confirmed that under certain conditions entanglement also reaches, or approximates, this bound. In this respect, our wool analogy seems to be working out.

## Holography

Holography, in the context of black holes, was sparked by a profound observation of Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking, which identified the surface area of a black hole horizon (in Planck units) with its entropy, or information content:

$S_{BH} = \frac{k A_{BH}}{4\ell_p^2}$.

Here, $S_{BH}$ is the entropy associated to the black hole, $A_{BH}$ is its horizon area, $\ell_p$ is the Planck length and $k$ is Boltzmann’s constant.
Why is this equation such a big deal? Well, there are many reasons, but let me emphasize one. For theoretical physicists, it is common to get rid of physical units by relating them through universal constants. For example, the theory of special relativity allows us to identify units of distance with units of time through the equation $d=ct$ using the speed of light c. General relativity further allows us to identify mass and energy through the famous $E=mc^2$. By considering the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, units of area are being swept away altogether! They are being identified with dimensionless units of information (one square meter is roughly $1.4\times10^{69}$ bits according to the Bousso bound).

Initially, the identification of area and information was proposed to reconcile black holes with the laws of thermodynamics. However, this has turned out to be the main hint leading to the holographic principle, wherein states that describe a certain volume of space in a theory of quantum gravity can also be thought of as being represented at the lower dimensional boundary of the given volume. This idea, put forth by Gerard ‘t Hooft, was later given a more precise interpretation by Leonard Susskind and subsequently by Juan Maldacena through the celebrated AdS/CFT correspondence. I will not dwell in the details of the AdS/CFT correspondence as I am not an expert myself. However, this correspondence gave S. Ryu and T. Takayanagi  (RT) a setting to vastly generalize the identification of area as an information quantity. They proposed identifying the area of minimal surfaces on the bulk (remember the minimal cut?) with entanglement entropy in the boundary theory.

Roughly speaking, if we were to split the boundary into two regions, left $L$ and right $R$ it should be possible to also partition the bulk in a way that each piece of the bulk has either $L$ or $R$ in its boundary. Ryu and Takayanagi proposed that the area of the smallest surface $\chi_R=\chi_L$ which splits the bulk in this way would be proportional to the entanglement entropy between the two parts

$S_L = S_R = \frac{|\chi_L|}{4G} =\frac{|\chi_R|}{4G}$.

It turns out that some quantum field theory states admit such a geometric interpretation. Many high energy theory colleagues have ideas about when this is possible and what are the necessary conditions. By far the best studied setting for this holographic duality is AdS/CFT, where Ryu and Takayanagi first checked their proposal. Here, the entanglement features of  the lowest energy state of a conformal field theory are matched to surfaces in a hyperbolic space (like the purple crochet and the tensor network presented). However, other geometries have been shown to match the RT prediction with respect to the entanglement properties of different states. The key point here is that the boundary states do not have any geometry per se. They just manifest different amounts of entanglement when partitioned in different ways.

## Emergence

The holographic program suggests that bulk geometry emerges from the entanglement properties of the boundary state. Spacetime materializes from the information structure of the boundary instead of being a fundamental structure as in general relativity. Am I saying that we should strip everything physical, including space in favor of ones and zeros? Well, first of all, it is not just me who is pushing this approach. Secondly, no one is claiming that we should start making all our physical reasoning in terms of ones and zeros.

Let me give an example. We know that the sea is composed mostly of water molecules. The observation of waves that travel, superpose and break can be labeled as an emergent phenomenon. However, to a surfer, a wave is much more real than the water molecules composing it and the fact that it is emergent is of no practical consequence when trying to predict where a wave will break. A proficient physicist, armed with tools from statistical mechanics (there are more than $10^{25}$ molecules per liter), could probably derive a macroscopic model for waves from the microscopic theory of particles. In the process of learning what the surfer already understood, he would identify elements of the  microscopic theory which become irrelevant for such questions. Such details could be whether the sea has an odd or even number of molecules or the presence of a few fish.

In the case of holography, each square meter corresponds to $1.4\times10^{69}$ bits of entanglement. We don’t even have words to describe anything close to this outrageously large exponent which leaves plenty of room for emergence. Even taking all the information on the internet – estimated at $10^{22}$ bits (10 zettabits) – we can’t even match the area equivalent of the smallest known particle. The fact that there are so many orders of magnitude makes it difficult to extrapolate our understanding of the geometric domain to the information domain and vice versa. This is precisely the realm where techniques such as those from statistical mechanics successfully get rid of irrelevant details.

High energy theorists and people with a background in general relativity tend to picture things in a continuum language. For example, part of their daily butter are Riemannian or Lorentzian manifolds which are respectively used to describe space and spacetime. In contrast, most of information theory is usually applied to deal with discrete elements such as bits, elementary circuit gates, etc. Nevertheless, I believe it is fruitful to straddle this cultural divide to the benefit of both parties. In a way, the convergence we are seeking is analogous to the one achieved by the kinetic theory of gases, which allowed the unification of thermodynamics with classical mechanics.

## So what did we do?

The remarkable success of the geometric RT prediction to different bulk geometries such as the BTZ black holes and the generality of the entanglement result for its random tensor network cousins emboldened us to take the RT prescription beyond its usual domain of application. We considered applying it to arbitrary Riemannian manifolds that are space-like and that can be approximated by a smoothly knit fabric.

Furthermore, we went on to consider the implications that such assumptions would have when the corresponding geometries are interpreted as error-correcting codes. In fact, our work elaborates on the perspective of A. Almheiri, X. Dong and D. Harlow (ADH) where quantum error-correcting code properties of AdS/CFT were laid out; it is hard to overemphasize the influence of this work. Our work considers general geometries and identifies properties a code associated to a specific holographic geometry should satisfy.

In the cat cradle/fabric metaphor for holography, the fingers at the boundary constitute the boundary theory without gravity and the resulted fabric represents a bulk geometry in the corresponding bulk gravitational theory. Bulk observables may be represented in different ways on the boundary, but not arbitrarily. This raises the question of which parts of the bulk correspond to which parts of the boundary. In general, there is not a one to one mapping. However, if we partition the boundary in two parts $L$ and $R$, we expect to be able to split the bulk into two corresponding regions  ${\mathcal E}[L]$  and  ${\mathcal E}[R]$. This is the content of the entanglement wedge hypothesis, which is our other main assumption.  In our metaphor, one could imagine that we pull the left fingers up and the right fingers down (taking care not to get hurt). At some point, the fabric breaks through $\chi_R$ into two pieces. In the setting we are concerned with, these pieces maintain part of the original structure, which tells us which bulk information was available in one piece of the boundary and which part was available in the other.

Although we do not produce new explicit examples of such codes, we worked our way towards developing a language which translates between the holographic/geometric perspective and the coding theory perspective. We specifically build upon the language of operator algebra quantum error correction (OAQEC) which allows individually focusing on different parts of the logical message. In doing so we identified several coding theoretic bounds and quantities, some of which we found to be applicable beyond the context of holography. A particularly noteworthy one is a strengthening of the quantum Singleton bound, which defines a trade-off between how much logical information can be packed in a code, how much physical space is used for encoding this information and how well-protected the information is from erasures.

One of the central observations of ADH highlights how quantum codes have properties from both classical error-correcting codes and secret sharing schemes. On the one hand, logical encoded information should be protected from loss of small parts of the carrier, a property quantified by the code distance. On the other hand, the logical encoded information should not become accessible until a sufficiently large part of the carrier is available to us. This is quantified by the threshold of a corresponding secret sharing scheme. We call this quantity price as it identifies how much of the carrier we would need before someone could reconstruct the message faithfully. In general, it is hard to balance these two competing requirements; a statement which can be made rigorous. This kind of complementarity has long been recognized in quantum cryptography. However, we found that according to holographic predictions, codes admitting a geometric interpretation achieve a remarkable optimality in the trade-off between these features.

Our exploration of alternative geometries is rewarded by the following guidelines

In uberholography, bulk observables are accessible in a Cantor type fractal shaped subregion of the boundary. This is illustrated on the Poincare disc presentation of negatively curved bulk.

• Hyperbolic geometries predict a fixed polynomial scaling for code distance. This is illustrated by a feature we call uberholography. We use this name because there is an excess of holography wherein bulk observables can be represented on intricate subsets of the boundary which have fractal dimension even smaller than the boundary itself.
• Hyperbolic geometries suggest the possibility of decoding procedures which are local on the boundary geometry. This property may be connected to the locality of the corresponding boundary field theory.
• Flat and positive curvature geometries may lead to codes with better parameters in terms of distance and rates (ratio of logical information to physical information). A hemisphere reaches optimum parameters, saturating coding bounds.

Seven iterations of a ternary Cantor set (dark line) on the unit interval. Each iteration is obtained by punching holes from the previous one and the set obtained in the limit is a fractal.

Current day quantum computers are far from the number of qubits required to invoke an emergent geometry. Nevertheless, it is exhilarating to take a step back and consider how the properties of the codes, and information in general, may be interpreted geometrically. On the other hand, I find that the quantum code language we adapt to the context of holography might eventually serve as a useful tool in distinguishing which boundary features are relevant or irrelevant for the emergent properties of the holographic dual. Ours is but one contribution in a very active field. However, the one thing I am certain about is that these are exciting times to be doing physics.

# IQIM Presents …”my father”

Debaleena Nandi at Caltech

Following the IQIM teaser, which was made with the intent of creating a wider perspective of the scientist, to highlight the normalcy behind the perception of brilliance and to celebrate the common human struggles to achieve greatness, we decided to do individual vignettes of some of the characters you saw in the video.

We start with Debaleena Nandi, a grad student in Prof Jim Eisenstein’s lab, whose journey from Jadavpur University in West Bengal, India to the graduate school and research facility at the Indian institute of Science, Bangalore, to Caltech has seen many obstacles. We focus on the essentials of an environment needed to manifest the quest for “the truth” as Debaleena says. We start with her days as a child when her double-shift working father sat by her through the days and nights that she pursued her homework.

She highlights what she feels is the only way to growth; working on what is lacking, to develop that missing tool in your skill set, that asset that others might have by birth but you need to inspire by hard work.

Debaleena’s motto: to realize and face your shortcomings is the only way to achievement.

As we build Debaleena up, we also build up the identity of Caltech through its breathtaking architecture that oscillates from Spanish to Goth to modern. Both Debaleena and Caltech are revealed slowly, bit by bit.

This series is about dissecting high achievers, seeing the day to day steps, the bit by bit that adds up to the more often than not, overwhelming, impressive presence of Caltech’s science. We attempt to break it down in smaller vignettes that help us appreciate the amount of discipline, intent and passion that goes into making cutting edge researchers.

Presenting the emotional alongside the rational is something this series aspires to achieve. It honors and celebrates human limitations surrounding limitless boundaries, discoveries and possibilities.

Stay tuned for more vignettes in the IQIM Presents “My _______” Series.

But for now, here is the video. Watch, like and share!

(C) Parveen Shah Production 2014

# The Navajo connection

A few months ago, Prof. Keith Schwab brought visiting students and teachers from Navajo Preparatory School to tour some of the IQIM labs, listen to some quick lectures on optics, and talk to scientists. Since this opportunity was only allowed to the one carload that made the 11.5 hour drive from Farmington, NM, everyone involved agreed that we could reach far more students if the IQIM sent Caltech students there. Ana Brown and I both enjoyed speaking with the visiting students and teachers, and responded enthusiastically when Prof. Schwab offered to send us.  My enthusiasm momentarily dimmed when I realized our trip would be occurring in the dead of winter and it was projected to snow while we were there (having only lived in northern and southern California, let’s say I have a heightened sensitivity to weather), but I excitedly spent thanksgiving putting together demonstrations with supplies I found in my closet and garage. I’ve always enjoyed talking about applied math, science, and engineering to anyone, especially anyone young enough to have only heard “math is boring” or “science is too hard” few enough times I can convince them otherwise.  Navajo Prep seemed ideal for this, since the school prepares the students well and sends over 95% of the students to college, and is working to increase student interest in math, science, and engineering.

Panorama from the center of Navajo Prep

With a suitcase half full of clothes and half full of tools and hacked-together electronics, I was picked up from the airport, and arrived at the school in the afternoon the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend. While Monday was spent arranging which classes I would attend, and what topics I would discuss, my second day involved a trip with the school’s outreach coordinator and Cody, one of the two students who visited Caltech, taking a tour of some of the local highlights, including a traditional Navajo lunch (steam corn stew, roast mutton, and I even tried ach’ii”) and toured the remnants of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, about half an hour from the school. Exploring a region with such a rich history and discussing it with my hosts, who are descendants in part from that history was an incredible experience.

Rooms at the Oak Tree House at Mesa Verde

On Wednesday, I began talking to the freshman physics classes about optics, intending to discuss the properties of light, like frequency, speed, wavelength, velocity, energy, and momentum, but to give some context I began with a historical summary of discoveries in optics. I know I was surprised when I was preparing, so you might enjoy answering the same questions that I asked the class. Take a second, and guess when you think the first lenses were made and when wearable glasses were first used. (After you think you have a guess, scroll to the bottom to see how you did.)  When I realized that the class was more interested in seeing rather than hearing about optics, I skimmed over what I’d prepared in order to spend more time on the demonstrations where I showed refraction in glass and explained how that can be derived from assuming a different speed of light in the material. We found lenses for the students to manipulate/play with, and even though historically there were about 300 years between invention of glasses (and the proliferation of lens-making) and the invention of the telescope, some of the students unintentionally built telescopes after taking a second lens from their friends and were shocked to hear that what they had just made was better than the one Galileo used to first discover the four largest moons of Jupiter.

Measuring focal lengths and observing lensing with a drop of water on a glass slide

We also demonstrated double slit diffraction and calculated light’s wavelength for three different laser pointers to within 5% accuracy using only a tape measure, a post-it, and a knife. I decided not to bring a demonstration to measure the speed of light with a laser, a few mirrors, a computer fan, and a reverse-biased photodiode hooked up to an old speaker, because I couldn’t get the fan to spin fast enough to get a reasonably short delay length. (From that can you guess what my set-up was?) On Thursday, Ana and I gave a similar lecture to a different pair of 90 minute freshman physics classes, and spent the other periods talking with math classes. In calculus, I described the different kinds of math classes offered in college, their applications, and their connections to each other in an attempt to give more meaning to the course titles they would no doubt be reading next fall. In geometry and trigonometry I answered the perennial high school math question: “when will we ever use this?” by talking about some applications in geometric optics.

Since I figure you readers like thinking about this sort of thing, I’ll elaborate: I started with the fact that a light beam’s incident angle (measured from the perpendicular of a surface) is equal to its reflected angle. This means that light propagation, like much of (but not all of) physics, is reversible in all but a few specific cases. As a result, light generated at or passing through the center of a circle is reflected off the circle back to the center. An ellipse has a similar property where light through one focus is all reflected to the other. Try deriving that from the fact that an ellipse is defined to be the set of all points where the sum of the distances to the two foci equals some fixed constant. In the lecture, I then used the fact that a parabola is the set of all points equidistant from a point (the focus) and a line (the directrix) to show that light from the focus is reflected off the parabola and collimated (focused at infinity).

Ana brought some IQIM hats and shirts, which the freshman physics classes seemed to definitely enjoy when we met with each class for 40 minutes on Friday.

One of the four freshman physics classes we got to spend time with

I tried to give them an impression of what we do in the IQIM, but I had a hard time giving a satisfactory explanation of the significance of quantum information, and Ana easily convinced me that it would be more engaging to use the 90 minute introduction I had already given them on optics to explain and describe solar energy, since many buildings deep in the Navajo reservation are off the power grid.  There are also plans to construct a large solar power plant on the reservation that will be much cleaner than the three local coal power plants in the region.

Action shot during the lecture on solar

Ana and I also spoke to the senior seminar, which contained the entire graduating class, where she talked about the difficulties transitioning to college experienced by some of her friends in college who were from the Navajo reservation. She gave such great advice on applying to schools, applying for fellowships, and developing a healthy work/life balance, that the only thing I felt like I could contribute was some advice on picking a major (since I’ve picked about 4 different majors), where I described the difference between science and engineering, and talked about different fields within each. I loved how truly helpful I felt when so many of the students told us that they either found certain pieces of advice to be useful, thanked us for introducing them to an idea they hadn’t heard of, or asked us to come back soon.

Occasionally a student asked what I personally do, and their curiosity was rewarded with an explanation that lasted as long as they were interested.  The shortest lasted two sentences and the longest explanation (given to a calculus class of 5 people) involved 30 minutes with my laptop out showing all the steps I take to fabricate nanoscale devices to trap light in almost a cubic-wavelength volume in proximity to an “optically interesting” rare earth ion which my advisor and I hope will provide a viable quantum optical memory.  (Here‘s a little more about our work.)

In the evenings we cheered for the school’s basketball team, had dinner with some of the students and teachers, and discussed the school’s science curriculum and science fair projects. Ana and I consulted on a solar water heating project some of the students were working on, and, after the students all went home for the weekend, I even spent 2 hours in 17ºF weather the last night calibrating an 8″ diameter Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope that had been donated to the school. Compared to Pasadena the viewing was spectacular, and I could easily spot galaxies, nebulae, and discern stripes on Jupiter and the four Galilean moons. I can only expect that some of the students I met will be as excited as I was.

From wikipedia: “The earliest known lenses were made from polished crystal, often quartz, and have been dated as early as 700 BC for Assyrian lenses” and “Around 1284 in Italy, Salvino D’Armate is credited with inventing the first wearable eye glasses.” For anyone who’s interested in the history of science, I’d suggest you check it out.

# More Brainteasers

As promised, I’m back to tell you more about myself and tickle your brain! I’m terribly sorry for giving such a short description of my background in my last post. If I had to describe myself in another $\leq 5$ words, I’d write: “Breakdancing, bodybuilding physicist… Ladies: single.”

Problem 1: A thousand balloons numbered 1, 2, … , 1000 are arranged in a circle. Starting with balloon 1, every alternating balloon is popped. So balloon 1 is popped, balloon 3 is popped, balloon 5 is popped, and so on until balloon 999 is popped. But the process does not stop here! We keep going around the circle with the remaining balloons and pop every other one. So next balloon 2 is popped, balloon 4 is skipped, balloon 6 is popped, and so on. This process continues until only one balloon is left remaining; which is the last balloon standing?

A thousand red balloons numbered from 1 to 1000. Starting at the gold star, we pop every other balloon while traveling clockwise. Which is the last balloon remaining?

It is of course easy to solve Problem 1 via brute force, but can you think of a more elegant solution? Do you really need to go around the circle $log(n)$ times? If you get stuck, try working on Problem 2 for a while:

Problem 2: A thousand people stand in single file on a game show. Each person is wearing a hat which is either black or white. Each person can see the hats of all the people in front of them in line but they cannot see their own hat. Starting with the person at the back of the line and progressing forward, the game show host will ask, “What color is your hat?” Each contestant is only permitted to answer “black” or “white.” For each correct answer, the host will donate \$1 to charity. If the contestants are allowed to discuss a strategy before they are lined up and given their hats, how much can they guarantee will be donated to charity?

If you managed to solve Problem 2, Problem 3 should be easy.

Problem 3: Now each person is given a hat which is one of $n$ colors, and is allowed to answer the host’s question by giving any of the $n$ colors. How much can the contestants guarantee will be donated to charity?

Problem 4: You are given ten coin-making machines which produce coins weighing 2 grams each. Each coin-maker can produce infinitely many coins. One of the ten machines, however, is defective and produces coins weighing 1 gram each. You are also given a scientific balance (with a numerical output). How many times must you use the balance to determine which machine is defective? What if the weight of the coins produced by the rogue machine is unknown?

I happen to be very good personal friends with Count von Count. One day as we were walking through Splash Castle, the Count told me he had passed his arithmetic class and was throwing a graduation party! Alas, before he could host the get-together, he needed to solve a problem on injective mappings from powersets to subsets of the natural numbers…

Problem 5: The Count has a thousand bottles of apple juice for his party, but one of the bottles contains spoiled juice! This spoiled juice induces tummy aches roughly a day after being consumed, and the Count wants to avoid lawsuits brought on by the innocent patrons of Sesame Place. Luckily, there is just enough time before the party for ten of the Count’s friends to perform exactly one round of taste-testing, during which they can drink from as many bottles as they please. How can the ten friends determine which bottle is both tummy ache- and lawsuit-inducing? You can assume Count’s friends have promised not to sue him if they get sick.

Please let me know what you think of these problems in the comments! Too easy? Too hard? Want more? Tell me so!

# This single-shot life

The night before defending my Masters thesis, I ran out of shampoo. I ran out late enough that I wouldn’t defend from beneath a mop like Jack Sparrow’s; but, belonging to the Luxuriant Flowing-Hair Club for Scientists (technically, if not officially), I’d have to visit Shopper’s Drug Mart.

The author’s unofficially Luxuriant Flowing Scientist Hair

Before visiting Shopper’s Drug Mart, I had to defend my thesis. The thesis, as explained elsewhere, concerns epsilons, the mathematical equivalents of seed pearls. The thesis also concerns single-shot information theory.

Ordinary information theory emerged in 1948, midwifed by American engineer Claude E. Shannon. Shannon calculated how efficiently we can pack information into symbols when encoding long messages. Consider encoding this article in the fewest possible symbols. Because “the” appears many times, you might represent “the” by one symbol. Longer strings of symbols suit misfits like “luxuriant” and “oobleck.” The longer the article, the fewer encoding symbols you need per encoded word. The encoding-to-encoded ratio decreases, toward a number called the Shannon entropy, as the message grows infinitely long.

Claude Shannon

We don’t send infinitely long messages, excepting teenagers during phone conversations. How efficiently can we encode just one article or sentence? The answer involves single-shot information theory, or—to those stuffing long messages into the shortest possible emails to busy colleagues—“1-shot info.” Pioneered within the past few years, single-shot theory concerns short messages and single trials, the Twitter to Shannon’s epic. Like articles, quantum states can form messages. Hence single-shot theory blended with quantum information in my thesis.

# Superconductors in the Summer

As a little girl I would play school with the neighborhood children. Ever since fourth grade I knew I wanted to be a teacher in a classroom full of eager-to-learn nine-year olds, but it wasn’t until my freshman year of college that my plans changed. In Geology for Elementary Teachers, I remember thinking, “This material is great! I need to learn more!” My hunger for a deeper understanding of how the physical world works led me to reflect on what my favorite science in high school was: Physics. Not long after, I changed my major to Physics and I was on the path to becoming a high school Physics teacher. Fast forward a decade, and I have my dream job. I get to explore the exciting world of Physics all day with 150+ adolescents and I wouldn’t change that for the world.

At Caltech after an exciting day at the lab!