Microsoft Research New England Weekly Event Digest
Here is a digest of the upcoming seminar sponsored by the Microsoft Research New England
Lab:
Theory Colloquium: Quantum Hamiltonian Complexity -- Umesh Vazirani, Berkeley | Wed June
13 @ 4 PM
ARRIVAL GUIDANCE:
Upon arrival, be prepared to show a picture ID and sign the Building Visitor Log when
approaching the Lobby Floor Security Desk. Alert them to the name of the MSR event you are
attending and ask them to direct you to the appropriate floor. Typically the talks are
located in the First Floor Conference Center, however sometimes the location may change.
More details follow:
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WHO: Umesh Vazirani
AFFILIATION: Berkeley
TITLE: Quantum Hamiltonian Complexity
HOST: Madhu Sudan
WHEN: Wednesday June 13th
WHERE: Microsoft Conference Center located at One Memorial Drive,
First Floor, Cambridge, MA
TIME: 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
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Abstract
We consider three basic questions about quantum mechanics:
1. Do `typical' quantum states that occur in Nature have succinct (polynomial)
description?
2. Can quantum systems at room temperature exhibit exponential complexity?
3. Is the scientific method sufficiently powerful to comprehend general quantum systems?
Each of these questions is best studied through a computational lens as a question
about computation. The resulting questions lie at the core of theory. The first asks
about the structure of solutions to the quantum analog of SAT. The second asks
whether there is a quantum analog of the PCP theorem. And the third can be
formulated as a question about interactive proof systems with BQP provers.
In this talk I will describe recent progress on these issues.
Biography
Umesh Vazirani received his B.Tech. in computer science from MIT in 1981 and his Ph.D. in
computer science from U.C. Berkeley in 1986. He is currently professor of computer science
at U.C. Berkeley and director of BQIC -the Berkeley center for Quantum Information and
Computation. Prof. Vazirani is a theoretician with broad interests in novel models of
computation. He has done seminal work in quantum computation and on the computational
foundations of randomness. He is the author of two books "An introduction to
computational learning theory" with Michael Kearns and "Algorithms" with
Sanjoy Dasgupta and Christos Papadimitriou.
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Edward Farhi
Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics
Director
Center for Theoretical Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6-300
Cambridge MA 02139
617 253 4871
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