Dr. Miles Miller-Dickson Successfully Defends Thesis

Congratulations to the new Dr. Miles Miller-Dickson on successfully defending his doctoral thesis, “On the Classical and Quantum Information Exchange Between Interacting Particles.”

Below is the abstract:

The information content of physical matter can be quantified in various ways. The Bekenstein-Hawking formula provides an avenue in the context of black hole physics, and the Shannon entropy provides another in the context of classical systems. Much less studied is the information flow between interacting systems, corresponding to a rate in bits per second. In this work we adopt a communication theory lens and develop several methods to quantify information exchange between interacting particles. We give meaning to the question of information flow between particles in classical and quantum systems. In the classical case, we derive a signal-to-noise formula for the information flow rate from an interacting environment to a particle, which is given as a ratio of the power flow to the particle, from the environment, to the particle’s initial energy. We make use of a short-time interaction approximation to show that classical information exchange between particles can be written in terms of the Fisher information matrix and of the signal covariance. In quantum settings, we show how quantum noise in classical channels limits the flow of information, and in the case of fully quantum information flow, we show how the coherent information, specialized to the case of interacting particles, quantifies information flow for a given interaction.  

Congratulations again!