Colloquium

In this talk I review some of what we have learned from string theory about the criteria one needs for a quantum theory to be able to consistently couple to quantum gravity (the landscape) as opposed to one that looks consistent but cannot be consistently coupled to gravity (the swampland).  Moreover, I review some of the cosmological implications of these conditions for our universe.

The Hubble constant remains one of the most important parameters in the cosmological model, setting the size and age scales of the Universe. Present uncertainties in the cosmological model including the nature of dark energy, the properties of neutrinos and the scale of departures from flat geometry can be constrained by measurements of the Hubble constant made to higher precision than was possible with the first generations of Hubble Telescope instruments.

Embezzlement of entanglement is the (impossible) task of producing an entangled state from a product state via a local change of basis, when a suitable catalytic entangled state is available.  The possibility to approximate this task was first observed by van Dam and Hayden in 2002.  Since then, the phenomenon is found to play crucial roles in many aspects of quantum information theory.  In this colloquium, we will explain various methods to embezzlement entanglement and explore applications (such as an extension to approximately violate other conservation laws, a Bell inequality that canno

Gauge theories are fundamental to our understanding of interactions between the elementary constituents of matter as mediated by gauge bosons. However, computing the real-time dynamics in gauge theories is a notorious challenge for classical computational methods. In the spirit of Feynman's vision of a quantum simulator, this has recently stimulated theoretical effort to devise schemes for simulating such theories on engineered quantum-mechanical devices, with the difficulty that gauge invariance and the associated local conservation laws (Gauss laws) need to be implemented.