Quantum Foundation Lecture 3 cancelled without any email notifications...

It was really embarrassing yesterday when I was sitting in the P C Saxena Auditorium for almost 20 minutes along with 6-7 other students hoping that sooner or later the lecture will happen. But I finally gave up and went to the physics department which is ten minutes walk from the auditorium. There I saw a small notice saying that the lecture has been canceled due to health problem of Prof Roy. But there could have been a better way to communicate the message. In fact, the people who used to make the video recording of the lectures also came to the auditorium and preparing for the recording when I left the place. I have no idea how long they as well as the other 6-7 students were waiting there. At least the message could have been put in the auditorium notice board. I don't think I will be enthusiastic enough to attend the remaining lectures. May be it is better to look at the lecture slides which will be put in the department website after the lecture ends.

Quantum Foundation Lecture part 2

Today's lecture was more like a question answer session. It was natural that students will come up with many doubts after yesterday's overdose..:P. Most of the time Prof Roy had to answer very basic doubts raised by the students. He started with two comments regarding yesterday's class: Bell's inequality is fully relativistic and violation of local reality by Quantum Mechanics does not mean that information can carried from one place to another with speed more than the speed of light in vacuum. Then he gave an introduction to density matrix for pure and mixed states. Then he talked about separable pure states. These states are basically non-entangled and obeys local reality, Bell's inequality. He then talked about N-particle correlation function and how difficult it is to find out whether the N particle states are entangled or not. Since violation of local reality grows exponentially with number of particles and so does entanglement, hence it can speed-up quantum computation very efficiently. He skipped the latter half of the lecture since he ran out of time answering the doubts of the students and will probably talk about that in the next lecture which is on 12th October.

Quantum Foundation Lecture part 1

Today I have attended the first part of the lecture series I mentioned in one of my previous posts. Prof Roy covered lots of things in his very first lecture which might have made the junior undergraduate students feel slightly demotivated. This is obvious because the students who have not yet learned basic quantum mechanics properly, how will they appreciate the inadequacies as well as inconsistencies in quantum mechanics which have led to extension of quantum mechanics. At the end of the lecture the Head of the Physics department had to request Prof Roy to teach at slightly lower level from tomorrow looking at the fact that there are many junior students who are attending the lectures.

Anyway being a senior graduate student, I even could not follow the latter half of the lecture. He started with the theoretical inadequacies in quantum mechanics in spite of tremendous success experimentally and tried to motivate why we need a richer theory. He then mentioned Schrodinger's Cat experiment, Double Slit experiment, Wheeler's delayed choice double slit experiment, EPR Paradox, the concept of local reality and Bell's inequality. Then he showed how quantum mechanics does not obey this inequality. Although the qualitative part was very clear, the rigorous mathematical steps to derive the inequality was too much within an hour and in the very first lecture I believe. I hope he will repeat some of the things which he did today in tomorrow's lecture and will make the ideas, motivations very clear instead of spending much time on the mathematical derivations. Since most of the people are not familiar to this field at all, so they should get the motivations first to do it rather than start with the mathematics. Hope to see as many people as there were today. It could have been better to arrange some coffee and cookies to attract more people. Hope SAPD will do that in future lecture series....:)

Lecture Series on 8, 9,12 and 13th October 2009

The Student Association of Physics Department IIT Bombay is organizing a series of lectures by Prof S.M. Roy (Retired Professor, TIFR, http://www.theory.tifr.res.in/~shasanka/ ). The details of the lectures are as follows:

* Lecture 1 - October 8th, Thursday at 5 PM at KRESIT Auditorium:
- Quantum Foundations
- Einstein Locality / Local Reality
- Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox
- Bell Inequalities

* Lecture 2 - October 9th, Friday at 6:30 PM at KRESIT Auditorium
- Many particle Bell Inequalities
- Schrodinger Cat States
- Quantum Entanglement & Tests of Quantum Entanglement

* Lecture 3 - October 12th, Monday at 5 PM at P C Saxena Auditorium
- Applications of quantum entanglement:
- Quantum Communication (cryptography, dense coding, teleportation)

* Lecture 4 - October 13th, Tuesday at 5 PM at P C Saxena Auditorium
- Quantum Computation:
- Grover's search algorithm
- Super-Zeno algorithm to preserve quantum states

The interested people can register for these lectures here http://www.phy.iitb.ac.in/lectures/smroy/ . Since very few people work on this area specially in India, I do hope this lecture series would generate lots of interest among people towards this field and will push for doing research related to one of the most fundamental aspects of modern physics.