# Quantum uncertainties defeat Laplace’s demon

I recently gave a colloquium at the Department of Applied Mathematics of Hanyang University in Ansan, Korea, in which I tried to introduce the idea of incompatibility of quantum measurements to students that were not all perfectly fluent in quantum theory.

Incompatibility, in the form of uncertainty relations, is available in many flavours: statistical and dynamical, variance-based and entropy-based, state-dependent and state-independent… As I was asked to share the slides, I’m now making them publicly available (click on the cover below):

The mechanical hybris is defeated!

# Einstein and quantum theory

I’ve been thinking a hundred times more about quantum problems than about general relativity.

# Visit to Hanyang University (ERICA), Ansan, Korea

I was invited to give a seminar to the quantum information group there (thank you, Joonwoo!) and a departmental colloquium with the students of applied mathematics. I thoroughly enjoyed every single moment of my visit (even the very hot floor in my apartment…): good friends, good discussions and (evviva!) good food.

Thank you for the hospitality!

# Visit to Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok

such a beautiful, lavishly green campus! thank you for the hospitality!

# Visit to Kasetsart University, Bangkok

thank you for the great hospitality!

# Quantum Lorenz curves and Hilbert α-divergences

In 1905, the American economist Max Lorenz introduced a way to graphically represent the concentration of wealth distribution in a country, what is now known as the country’s Lorenz curve. Since then, Lorenz curves have found uncountable applications in a wide range of quantitative sciences, ranging from mathematical statistics to biology and finance. Whenever discrete distributions (including not only probability distributions, but also assets portfolios or biodiversity indicators) appear in the modeling of a problem, Lorenz curves and related ideas such as majorization are likely to play a crucial role.

If wealth were quantum, how would you measure wealth concentration?

Quantum theory deals with objects, quantum states, that from many viewpoints resemble discrete distributions, but with the crucial difference of being non-commutative. In a paper published few days ago on Physical Review A, Gilad Gour and I generalize the definition of Lorenz curves to arbitrary pairs of quantum states, reconstructing the classical theory of majorization in the case commuting states, and discussing applications of this new tool in the emerging fields of quantum thermodynamics and quantum resource theories.

A tool that we introduce (and that may potentially be of general interest) is the family of divergences $H_\alpha(\rho\|\sigma)$ (for $\alpha$ varying between 1 and $\infty$) that we name “Hilbert α-divergences” due to their close kinship with Hilbert’s metric, and which interpolate between the trace-distance $\frac{1}{2} \|\rho-\sigma\|_1=\ln2\lim_{\alpha\to 1}H_\alpha(\rho\|\sigma)$ and the max-relative entropy $D_{\max}(\rho\|\sigma)=\lim_{\alpha\to \infty}H_\alpha(\rho\|\sigma)$.

F. Buscemi and G. Gour, Quantum Relative Lorenz Curves. Physical Review A, vol. 95, 012110 (2017). The paper is available in its journal version (paywall) and on the arXiv (free).