Fundamental Limits on the Speed of Evolution of Quantum States

This paper reports on some new inequalities of Margolus-Levitin-Mandelstam-Tamm-type involving the speed of quantum evolution between two orthogonal pure states. The clear determinant of the qualitative behavior of this time scale is the statistics of the energy spectrum. An often-overlooked correspondence between the real-time behavior of a quantum system and the statistical mechanics of a transformed (imaginary-time) thermodynamic system appears promising as a source of qualitative insights into the quantum dynamics.Comment: 6 pages, 1 eps figur

On the use of non-canonical quantum statistics

We develop a method using a coarse graining of the energy fluctuations of an equilibrium quantum system which produces simple parameterizations for the behaviour of the system. As an application, we use these methods to gain more understanding on the standard Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics and on the recently developed Tsallis statistics. We conclude on a discussion of the role of entropy and the maximum entropy principle in thermodynamics.Comment: 29 pages, uses iopart.cls, major revisions of text for better readability, added a discussion about essentially microcanonical ensemble

First-Principles-Based Thermodynamic Description of Solid Copper Using the Tight-Binding Approach

A tight-binding model is fit to first-principles calculations for copper that include structures distorted according to elastic constants and high-symmetry phonon modes. With the resulting model the first-principles-based phonon dispersion and the free energy are calculated in the quasi-harmonic approximation. The resulting thermal expansion, the temperature- and volume-dependence of the elastic constants, the Debye temperature, and the Gruneisen parameter are compared with available experimental data.Comment: submitted to Physical Review

Detection of a Moving Rigid Solid in a Perfect Fluid

In this paper, we consider a moving rigid solid immersed in a potential fluid. The fluid-solid system fills the whole two dimensional space and the fluid is assumed to be at rest at infinity. Our aim is to study the inverse problem, initially introduced in [3], that consists in recovering the position and the velocity of the solid assuming that the potential function is known at a given time. We show that this problem is in general ill-posed by providing counterexamples for which the same potential corresponds to different positions and velocities of a same solid. However, it is also possible to find solids having a specific shape, like ellipses for instance, for which the problem of detection admits a unique solution. Using complex analysis, we prove that the well-posedness of the inverse problem is equivalent to the solvability of an infinite set of nonlinear equations. This result allows us to show that when the solid enjoys some symmetry properties, it can be partially detected. Besides, for any solid, the velocity can always be recovered when both the potential function and the position are supposed to be known. Finally, we prove that by performing continuous measurements of the fluid potential over a time interval, we can always track the position of the solid.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figure

Microscopic expressions for the thermodynamic temperature

We show that arbitrary phase space vector fields can be used to generate phase functions whose ensemble averages give the thermodynamic temperature. We describe conditions for the validity of these functions in periodic boundary systems and the Molecular Dynamics (MD) ensemble, and test them with a short-ranged potential MD simulation.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, Revtex. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Generalized Induced Norms

Let ||.|| be a norm on the algebra M_n of all n-by-n matrices over the complex field C. An interesting problem in matrix theory is that "are there two norms ||.||_1 and ||.||_2 on C^n such that ||A||=max{||Ax||_2: ||x||_1=1} for all A in M_n. We will investigate this problem and its various aspects and will discuss under which conditions ||.||_1=||.||_2.Comment: 8 page

Power of unentangled measurements on two antiparallel spins

We consider a pair of antiparallel spins polarized in a random direction to encode quantum information. We wish to extract as much information as possible on the polarization direction attainable by an unentangled measurement, i.e., by a measurement, whose outcomes are associated with product states. We develop analytically the upper bound 0.7935 bits to the Shannon mutual information obtainable by an unentangled measurement, which is definitely less than the value 0.8664 bits attained by an entangled measurement. This proves our main result, that not every ensemble of product states can be optimally distinguished by an unentangled measurement, if the measure of distinguishability is defined in the sense of Shannon. We also present results from numerical calculations and discuss briefly the case of parallel spins.Comment: Latex file, 18 pages, 1 figure; published versio