I’m at Benasque, Spain for the Quantum Coherence and Decoherence 2010 conference. The participants are people I feel I should have met a long time ago. Also, the center is in a beautiful new building with many areas for discussion, all with blackboards.
This is my first time at Benasque, and the philosophy of the conference is great: this is a place for people to meet and get new collaborations going. The program is informal, but well attended. The talks are decided depending on the group’s interests. Yesterday, it was Discord Day:
- Quantum Discord and Quantum Computation – Animesh Datta gave a fantastic review of the definition of discord, and then of his work on its role as a quantum resource for DQC1 algorithm.
- System-Environment Quantum Discord for General Dynamics – I discussed the very special properties that classical correlations between the system and the environment have. In particular the issues of Complete Positivity, its connection to No-Broadcasting, and to general bounds for decoherence rates.
- Quantum Discord, One Goblin, and Two Demons – Aharon Brodutch presented a picture where quantum discord is related to Szilard Demons, as well as some preliminary result suggesting that you need entanglement in other to process discord for quantum computation.
- Operational Interpretation of Quantum Discord – Leandro Aolita provided a much-looked-for operational interpretation for quantum discord. In particular, he showed how it is related to quantum state merging.
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If you want to succeed in the world, you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people. You just have to be one day earlier.
-Leo Szilard
Minus Two Fish 
I think quantum theory in its present formulation is not applicable to bio-systems, because the specificity of a complex biological activity does not arise from the specificity of the individual molecules that are involved. Moreover the interaction of a classical system with its environment decohere the wave-function. To overcome these limitations something new is needed. I think it is necessary to broaden the concept of matter,i.e., to broaden the ontological foundation of contemporary physical theory. Matter is regarded to have matter waves at high mass density; unrealizing that it has also got bio-information oscillations at high information density. Thus I postulated that matter has complementary properties: matter waves at high mass density and bio-information oscillations at high information density. Such complementarity preserves Shrodinger’s system to accomplish different tasks: it incorporates matter waves to account for inanimate phenomena or it incorporates bio-information oscillations to account for biological phenomena. It follows a material system does not possess simultaneously bio-information oscillations and matter waves descriptions.
Please see my paper ” Towards a new physical theory of biotic evolution and development” Ecological Modeling 221 (2010) 1108-1118, where I demonstrated that the genome, for successive generations, generates bio-information oscillations. And that the bio-system is a quantum information oscillator.
Elsheikh
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Hi,
There was a recent paper by Madhok, Datta on discord and state merging.
Do you know about their approach?
Thanks
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Yes, you refer to: http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4135
Datta’s paper is closely related to the paper linked above by Leandro Aolita. Leandro’s presentation explained how in a State Merging protocol, Discord is related to the cost of stage merging. Putting together the work of Datta and Aolita, it suggests that Quantum Discord is a very important quantity for measuring the efficiency of quantum information processes.
Cesar
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Hi Cesar,
Thanks for the brief report.
However I am still a bit confused when you say “putting together the work of Datta and Aolita”.
Could you slightly elaborate, how one can connect two works.
Also, what did Aolita had to say about the connection of the two works.
Once again, thanks,
M
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From what I understand, their insight that discord is related to state merging is similar, but the results they derive are different. In the end, their interpretations aren’t the same, but aren’t exclusive of each other either. Do you have any more specific questions, it is hard to summarize a paper here.
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