Recent and ongoing "new materialisms" scholarship seeks to fundamentally reshape the humanities and their relationship with the sciences. While this work comprises multiple and varied currents, one of the most important, yet whose distinctive merits are arguably often underappreciated, is that influenced by the theoretical physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad. The first volume devoted to bringing Barad’s work into conversation with the disciplines of rhetoric and communication studies, this collection organizes that conversation primarily around her notion of "entanglement", which encourages an understanding of meaning as inherently performative, material, and ecological. In doing so, the essays in this collection variously approach rhetoric as a "figure of entanglement" in ways that contribute to and enrich both rhetoric and Barad’s theorizing. Topics range from politics to breast cancer, genealogy, the trope of academic "turns," Marx’s notion of exchange, and the "prehistoric" emergence of human consciousness. With a new foreword by the editors and afterword by Laurie E. Gries, this collection is otherwise reprinted from the 2016 "Figures of Entanglement" special issue of the journal Review of Communication.

Entanglement theory posits that the interrelationship of humans and objects is a delimiting characteristic of human history and culture. This edited volume of original studies by leading archaeological theorists applies this concept to a broad range of topics, including archaeological science, heritage, and theory itself. In the theoretical explications and ten case studies, the editors and contributing authors build on the intersections between science, humanities and ecology to provide a more fine-grained, multi-scalar treatment emanating from the long-term perspective that characterizes archaeological research. This broad focus is inclusive of early complex developments in Asia and Europe, imperial and state strategies in the Andes and Mesoamerica, continuities of postcolonialism in North America, and the unforeseen and complex consequences that derive from archaeological practices. This volume will appeal to archaeologists and their advanced students.

This monograph forms an interdisciplinary study in atomic, molecular, and quantum information (QI) science. Here a reader will find that applications of the tools developed in QI provide new physical insights into electron optics as well as properties of atoms & molecules which, in turn, are useful in studying QI both at fundamental and applied levels. In particular, this book investigates entanglement properties of flying electronic qubits generated in some of the well known processes capable of taking place in an atom or a molecule following the absorption of a photon. Here, one can generate Coulombic or fine-structure entanglement of electronic qubits. The properties of these entanglements differ not only from each other, but also from those when spin of an inner-shell photoelectron is entangled with the polarization of the subsequent fluorescence. Spins of an outer-shell electron and of a residual photoion can have free or bound entanglement in a laboratory.

Characterizing entanglement is an important issue in quantum information, as it is considered to be a resource for many applications such as quantum key distribution or quantum metrology. One useful tool to detect and quantify entanglement are witness operators. A standard way to construct them is based on the fidelity of pure states and mathematically relies on the Schmidt decomposition of vectors. In this book a method to build entanglement witnesses using the Schmidt decomposition of operators is presented. One can show that these are strictly stronger than the fidelity witnesses. Moreover, the concept can be generalized easily to the multipartite case, and one may use it to quantify the dimensionality of entanglement. Finally, this scheme will be used to provide two algorithms that can be combined to improve given witnesses for multiparticle entanglement.

Recent work in quantum information science has produced a revolution in our understanding of quantum entanglement. Scientists now view entanglement as a physical resource with many important applications. These range from quantum computers, which would be able to compute exponentially faster than classical computers, to quantum cryptographic techniques, which could provide unbreakable codes for the transfer of secret information over public channels. These important advances in the study of quantum entanglement and information touch on deep foundational issues in both physics and philosophy. This interdisciplinary volume brings together fourteen of the world's leading physicists and philosophers of physics to address the most important developments and debates in this exciting area of research. It offers a broad spectrum of approaches to resolving deep foundational challenges - philosophical, mathematical, and physical - raised by quantum information, quantum processing, and entanglement. This book is ideal for historians, philosophers of science and physicists.

This book is devoted to research topics in quantum entanglement at the energy frontier of particle and nuclear physics, and important interdisciplinary collaborations with colleagues from fields outside of physics. A non-exhaustive list of examples of the latter can include mathematics, computer science, social sciences, philosophy, and how physics can interact with them in a way that supports successful outcomes. These are exciting times in the field of quantum information science, with new research results and their applications in society exhibiting themselves rather frequently. But what is even more exciting is that the frequency of these new results and their applications increases with a rapidity that will motivate new methods, new theories, new experiments, and new collaborations outside of the field that future researchers will find quite challenging.

This open-access book investigates Francophone Caribbean literature by exploring and analyzing French seventeenth-century travel writings. The book argues for a literary re-examination of the representation of the early colonial Caribbean by proposing theoretical linkages to contemporary Caribbean theories of creolization and archipelagic thinking. Using Édouard Glissant’s notion of points of entanglement, Christina Kullberg claims that the historical, social, and political messiness of the Caribbean seventeenth century make for complex representations and expressions, generating textual instability despite the travelers’ apparent desires to domesticate the islands. Taking a synoptic approach to travel narratives in French from 1620 up to the publication of Labat’s Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique in 1722, Kullberg examines textual instances where the islands and the peoples of this period disrupt and unsettle dominant French narratives and enter productively into the construction of knowledge and the representations of the region. Kullberg’s contribution is to read French early modern travels in situ as shaped by the archipelagic geography, its history and social formations in order to interrogate both the construction and the limitations of discourses of power.

This thesis focuses on the study and characterization of entanglement and nonlocal correlations constrained under symmetries. It includes original results as well as detailed methods and explanations for a number of different threads of research: positive partial transpose (PPT) entanglement in the symmetric states; a novel, experimentally friendly method to detect nonlocal correlations in many-body systems; the non-equivalence between entanglement and nonlocality; and elemental monogamies of correlations. Entanglement and nonlocal correlations constitute two fundamental resources for quantum information processing, as they allow novel tasks that are otherwise impossible in a classical scenario. However, their elusive characterization is still a central problem in quantum information theory. The main reason why such a fundamental issue remains a formidable challenge lies in the exponential growth in complexity of the Hilbert space as well as the space of multipartite correlations. Physical systems of interest, on the other hand, display symmetries that can be exploited to reduce this complexity, opening the possibility that some of these questions become tractable for such systems.

An exploration of quantum entanglement and the ways in which it contradicts our everyday assumptions about the ultimate nature of reality. Quantum physics is notable for its brazen defiance of common sense. (Think of Schrödinger's Cat, famously both dead and alive.) An especially rigorous form of quantum contradiction occurs in experiments with entangled particles. Our common assumption is that objects have properties whether or not anyone is observing them, and the measurement of one can't affect the other. Quantum entanglement—called by Einstein “spooky action at a distance”—rejects this assumption, offering impeccable reasoning and irrefutable evidence of the opposite. Is quantum entanglement mystical, or just mystifying? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Jed Brody equips readers to decide for themselves. He explains how our commonsense assumptions impose constraints—from which entangled particles break free. Brody explores such concepts as local realism, Bell's inequality, polarization, time dilation, and special relativity. He introduces readers to imaginary physicists Alice and Bob and their photon analyses; points out that it's easier to reject falsehood than establish the truth; and reports that some physicists explain entanglement by arguing that we live in a cross-section of a higher-dimensional reality. He examines a variety of viewpoints held by physicists, including quantum decoherence, Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, genuine fortuitousness, and QBism. This relatively recent interpretation, an abbreviation of “quantum Bayesianism,” holds that there's no such thing as an absolutely accurate, objective probability “out there,” that quantum mechanical probabilities are subjective judgments, and there's no “action at a distance,” spooky or otherwise.