Spectral Gap (physics)
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Spectral Gap (physics)
In quantum mechanics, the spectral gap of a system is the energy difference between its ground state and its first excited state. The mass gap is the spectral gap between the vacuum and the lightest particle. A Hamiltonian with a spectral gap is called a ''gapped'' Hamiltonian, and those that do not are called ''gapless''. In solid-state physics, the most important spectral gap is for the many-body system of electrons in a solid material, in which case it is often known as an energy gap. In quantum many-body systems, ground states of gapped Hamiltonians have exponential decay of correlations. In 2015, it was shown that the problem of determining the existence of a spectral gap is undecidable in two or more dimensions. The authors used an aperiodic tiling of quantum Turing machines and showed that this hypothetical material becomes gapped if and only if the machine halts. The one-dimensional case was also proven undecidable in 2020 by constructing a chain of interacting qutri ...
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Quantum Mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science. Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale. Quantum mechanics differs from classical physics in that energy, momentum, angular momentum, and other quantities of a bound system are restricted to discrete values ( quantization); objects have characteristics of both particles and waves (wave–particle duality); and there are limits to ...
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Undecidable Problem
In computability theory and computational complexity theory, an undecidable problem is a decision problem for which it is proved to be impossible to construct an algorithm that always leads to a correct yes-or-no answer. The halting problem is an example: it can be proven that there is no algorithm that correctly determines whether arbitrary programs eventually halt when run. Background A decision problem is any arbitrary yes-or-no question on an infinite set of inputs. Because of this, it is traditional to define the decision problem equivalently as the set of inputs for which the problem returns ''yes''. These inputs can be natural numbers, but also other values of some other kind, such as strings of a formal language. Using some encoding, such as a Gödel numbering, the strings can be encoded as natural numbers. Thus, a decision problem informally phrased in terms of a formal language is also equivalent to a set of natural numbers. To keep the formal definition simple, it is ...
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Quantum Mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science. Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale. Quantum mechanics differs from classical physics in that energy, momentum, angular momentum, and other quantities of a bound system are restricted to discrete values ( quantization); objects have characteristics of both particles and waves (wave–particle duality); and there are limits to ...
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Spectral Gap
In mathematics, the spectral gap is the difference between the moduli of the two largest eigenvalues of a matrix or operator; alternately, it is sometimes taken as the smallest non-zero eigenvalue. Various theorems relate this difference to other properties of the system. See also * Cheeger constant (graph theory) * Cheeger constant (Riemannian geometry) * Eigengap * Spectral gap (physics) * Spectral radius In mathematics, the spectral radius of a square matrix is the maximum of the absolute values of its eigenvalues. More generally, the spectral radius of a bounded linear operator is the supremum of the absolute values of the elements of its spectru ... References External links * {{Mathanalysis-stub Spectral theory ...
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List Of Undecidable Problems
In computability theory, an undecidable problem is a type of computational problem that requires a yes/no answer, but where there cannot possibly be any computer program that always gives the correct answer; that is, any possible program would sometimes give the wrong answer or run forever without giving any answer. More formally, an undecidable problem is a problem whose language is not a recursive set; see the article Decidable language. There are uncountably many undecidable problems, so the list below is necessarily incomplete. Though undecidable languages are not recursive languages, they may be subsets of Turing recognizable languages: i.e., such undecidable languages may be recursively enumerable. Many, if not most, undecidable problems in mathematics can be posed as word problems: determining when two distinct strings of symbols (encoding some mathematical concept or object) represent the same object or not. For undecidability in axiomatic mathematics, see List of stateme ...
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Qutrit
A qutrit (or quantum trit) is a unit of quantum information that is realized by a 3-level quantum system, that may be in a superposition of three mutually orthogonal quantum states. The qutrit is analogous to the classical radix-3 trit, just as the qubit, a quantum system described by a superposition of two orthogonal states, is analogous to the classical radix-2 bit. There is ongoing work to develop quantum computers using qutrits and qubits with multiple states. Representation A qutrit has three orthonormal basis states or vectors, often denoted , 0\rangle, , 1\rangle, and , 2\rangle in Dirac or bra–ket notation. These are used to describe the qutrit as a superposition state vector in the form of a linear combination of the three orthonormal basis states: :, \psi\rangle = \alpha , 0\rangle + \beta , 1\rangle + \gamma , 2\rangle, where the coefficients are complex probability amplitudes, such that the sum of their squares is unity (normalization): : , \alpha , ^2 + , \bet ...
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If And Only If
In logic and related fields such as mathematics and philosophy, "if and only if" (shortened as "iff") is a biconditional logical connective between statements, where either both statements are true or both are false. The connective is biconditional (a statement of material equivalence), and can be likened to the standard material conditional ("only if", equal to "if ... then") combined with its reverse ("if"); hence the name. The result is that the truth of either one of the connected statements requires the truth of the other (i.e. either both statements are true, or both are false), though it is controversial whether the connective thus defined is properly rendered by the English "if and only if"—with its pre-existing meaning. For example, ''P if and only if Q'' means that ''P'' is true whenever ''Q'' is true, and the only case in which ''P'' is true is if ''Q'' is also true, whereas in the case of ''P if Q'', there could be other scenarios where ''P'' is true and ''Q'' is ...
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Quantum Turing Machine
A quantum Turing machine (QTM) or universal quantum computer is an abstract machine used to model the effects of a quantum computer. It provides a simple model that captures all of the power of quantum computation—that is, any quantum algorithm can be expressed formally as a particular quantum Turing machine. However, the computationally equivalent quantum circuit is a more common model. Quantum Turing machines can be related to classical and probabilistic Turing machines in a framework based on transition matrices. That is, a matrix can be specified whose product with the matrix representing a classical or probabilistic machine provides the quantum probability matrix representing the quantum machine. This was shown by Lance Fortnow. Informal sketch A way of understanding the quantum Turing machine (QTM) is that it generalizes the classical Turing machine (TM) in the same way that the quantum finite automaton (QFA) generalizes the deterministic finite automaton (DFA). ...
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Aperiodic Tiling
An aperiodic tiling is a non-periodic tiling with the additional property that it does not contain arbitrarily large periodic regions or patches. A set of tile-types (or prototiles) is aperiodic if copies of these tiles can form only non- periodic tilings. The Penrose tilings are the best-known examples of aperiodic tilings. Aperiodic tilings serve as mathematical models for quasicrystals, physical solids that were discovered in 1982 by Dan Shechtman who subsequently won the Nobel prize in 2011. However, the specific local structure of these materials is still poorly understood. Several methods for constructing aperiodic tilings are known. Definition and illustration Consider a periodic tiling by unit squares (it looks like infinite graph paper). Now cut one square into two rectangles. The tiling obtained in this way is non-periodic: there is no non-zero shift that leaves this tiling fixed. But clearly this example is much less interesting than the Penrose tiling. In order t ...
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Energy Gap
In solid-state physics, an energy gap is an energy range in a solid where no electron states exist, i.e. an energy range where the density of states vanishes. Especially in condensed-matter physics, an energy gap is often known more abstractly as a spectral gap, a term which need not be specific to electrons or solids. Band gap If an energy gap exists in the band structure of a material, it is called band gap. The physical properties of semiconductors are to a large extent determined by their band gaps, but also for insulators and metals the band structure—and thus any possible band gaps—govern their electronic properties. Superconductors For superconductors the energy gap is a region of suppressed density of states around the Fermi energy, with the size of the energy gap much smaller than the energy scale of the band structure. The superconducting energy gap is a key aspect in the theoretical description of superconductivity and thus features prominently in BCS theory. Her ...
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Ground State
The ground state of a quantum-mechanical system is its stationary state of lowest energy; the energy of the ground state is known as the zero-point energy of the system. An excited state is any state with energy greater than the ground state. In quantum field theory, the ground state is usually called the vacuum state or the vacuum. If more than one ground state exists, they are said to be degenerate. Many systems have degenerate ground states. Degeneracy occurs whenever there exists a unitary operator that acts non-trivially on a ground state and commutes with the Hamiltonian of the system. According to the third law of thermodynamics, a system at absolute zero temperature exists in its ground state; thus, its entropy is determined by the degeneracy of the ground state. Many systems, such as a perfect crystal lattice, have a unique ground state and therefore have zero entropy at absolute zero. It is also possible for the highest excited state to have absolute zero temper ...
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Many-body Theory
The many-body problem is a general name for a vast category of physical problems pertaining to the properties of microscopic systems made of many interacting particles. ''Microscopic'' here implies that quantum mechanics has to be used to provide an accurate description of the system. ''Many'' can be anywhere from three to infinity (in the case of a practically infinite, homogeneous or periodic system, such as a crystal), although three- and four-body systems can be treated by specific means (respectively the Faddeev and Faddeev–Yakubovsky equations) and are thus sometimes separately classified as few-body systems. In general terms, while the underlying physical laws that govern the motion of each individual particle may (or may not) be simple, the study of the collection of particles can be extremely complex. In such a quantum system, the repeated interactions between particles create quantum correlations, or entanglement. As a consequence, the wave function of the system is ...
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