Quantum Institute Seminar: Aram Harrow

In quantum information, entanglement has often been viewed as a resource. But in this talk, I will look at (pure bipartite) entanglement through the lens of superselection rules. The idea is that it requires quantum communication not only to create entanglement, but also to destroy it in a way that doesn't leak information to the environment. As a result, when communication is scarce, superpositions of different numbers of EPR pairs can be difficult to obtain. This constraint is not a strict superselection rule, but rather an approximate version that gives rigorous bounds on achievable fidelities. After describing the general phenomenon, I will show how it relates to communication complexity, information theory and fairy tales about princesses. This talk is based on 0803.3066, 0909.1557, 0912.5537 and other unpublished work.