| Announcements
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I posted an eleventh homework, which is due never. It has some simple exercises with Hamiltonians made of pauli matrices where all the terms commute. Ignore it if you wish.
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2019-12-09 |
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Since we had a Monday holiday this quarter, we'll have a make-up lecture on Monday December 9
in MHA 5623 at the usual time.
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2019-12-03 |
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Since the homework will now be due on Wednesdays, I've moved my office hours to Mondays.
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2019-11-18 |
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Because of the holiday on Monday, 2019-11-11, the HW06 deadline is moved to Wednesday 2019-11-13. I added a problem.
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2019-11-06 |
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Physics 239/139, Fall 2019: Quantum Information is Physical.
The subject of the course is ideas from information theory which have been or may be useful
for quantum many body physics.
Here is a slightly longer description of my current plan:
The course will include a primer on Shannon's theory
on the compression and transmission of information,
and its extensions to quantum systems.
Applications to many-body physics incorporate
the consequences of locality, which include
-- the ubiquitous area law for the entanglement entropy
of subsystems in low-energy states,
-- constraints on the dynamics of quantum field theories,
and
-- the ideas about tensor networks which underlie state-of-the-art numerical methods.
The final section of the course will explore the deep connections
between fault-tolerant quantum computers and
highly-entangled (spin liquid) phases of matter.
The target audience includes
students working on high energy physics, condensed matter physics (soft and hard) and astrophysics,
both theorists and experimenters, as well as ambitious undergrads with some familiarity with quantum mechanics.
The website for a previous incarnation of the course is
here.
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A number of students have asked about whether there is a quantum mechanics prerequisite for the course.
Although there is no official prerequisite, I have to emphasize up front that it will be a big and interesting challenge
to keep up with this course without having taken at least the upper-division (130) sequence.
Those of you who haven't should make sure to come talk to me privately (send me email or try to catch me in my office any afternoon).
Having given this warning, here is some advice for how to do so. Option one is
to study Chapter 1 of these notes.
This gives an introduction to quantum mechanics which bypasses the complications of
infinite-dimensional hilbert spaces and differential equations. A second option
is to study the textbook by Schumacher and Westmoreland (available from the UCSD library
here), in particular chapters 1-8.
For those of you with limited prior experience with quantum mechanics, I've written a bonus problem set (problem set 0.5)
to help you catch up.
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2019-08-27 |
Text: My lecture notes.
More suggested reading material can be found therein.
Lecture:
MW 12:30-1:50pm,
in Mayer Hall Addition 2702.
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