Matt Leifer

There is an opportunity for a graduate student to visit Perimeter Institute for a 3 month period to work with me on a technical project in Quantum Foundations. The main idea is to give students who are interested in quantum foundations, but working in other fields for their grad studies, the opportunity to take a break and think about quantum theory seriously for a short period. The position is funded by FQXi under my project “Abstract Quantum Probability” and the project would be selected by mutual agreement from one of the topics covered by the grant.

Funding will be provided, but the exact amount depends on Canadian immigration issues, i.e. we can only provide subsistence expenses (travel, accommodation and a per-diem for meals) to non-Canadian residents. The visit can take place at any time during the year, depending on what is most convenient for the student and myself.

If you are interested then please send your CV, a short (one or two paragraph) explanation of why you would like to visit PI and a letter of recommendation from your advisor to me at this address. There is no official deadline for applications and the search will continue until a suitable candidate is found. However, I expect there will be enough applications to make a decision by the end of September.

For further details of the possible areas of research for this project, please see the reading list below.

• Information processing In generalized probabilistic theories:
  • J. Barrett, Information Processing in Generalized Probabilistic Theories.
  • H. Barnum, J. Barrett, M. Leifer and A. Wilce, Cloning and Broadcasting in Generic Probabilistic Theories.
• Generalized subsystems in quantum theory:
  • Project would be related to H. Barnum, G. Ortiz, R. Somma and L. Viola, Generalization of entanglement to convex operational theories: Entanglement relative to a subspace of observables.
• Causality from Statistics
  • L. Hardy, Towards Quantum Gravity: A Framework for Probabilistic Theories with Non-Fixed Causal Structure.
  • M. Leifer and D. Poulin, Quantum Graphical Models and Belief Propagation.
  • M. Leifer, Quantum Dynamics as an Analog of Conditional Probability.
  • M. Leifer, Conditional Density Operators and the Subjectivity of Quantum Operations.
• Bayesian foundations of quantum theory
  • Many papers by Caves, Fuchs and Schack would be good background reading, particularly quant-ph/0404156, quant-ph/0205039, quant-ph/0206110 and quant-ph/0106133.
  • M. Leifer, Conditional Density Operators and the Subjectivity of Quantum Operations.
• Axiomatic foundations of quantum theory
  • L. Hardy, Quantum Theory from Five Reasonable Axioms.
  • C. Fuchs, Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Information (and only a little more).
  • G. d’Ariano, Operational Axioms for a C*-algebraic formulation of quantum mechanics as well as earlier related papers by d’Ariano.
  • Also the papers on information processing in generalized probabilistic theories and this paper by H. Barnum.