Mathematics Student & Faculty Research
The Mathematical Physics Research Group at Lebanon Valley College conducts collaborative research involving undergraduate students from mathematics, physics, and computer science.
- Interdisciplinary, student-faculty research. Recent areas of primary focus have been functional programming and quantum information science. Our work is interdisciplinary, involving physics, mathematics, and computer science.
- Functional Programming. The application of powerful conceptual tools from computer science brings insight and adventure to physics pedagogy and research. Dr. Walck and students use functional programming languages for novel applications in computational physics.
- Quantum Information Science. The prospect of harnessing quantum mechanical systems to process information promises spectacular applications. These include encrypted communication with fundamentally new levels of security, computing machines that will outperform existing supercomputers, and improved measurement devices that will probe new physical realms. The `quantum advantage’ at the heart of these revolutionary technologies arises from exploiting entanglement and other non-local properties that are easy to define, but difficult to analyze. Our research group has achieved a body of results that analyze local symmetry (that is, operations on individual particles of a composite physical system that leave its quantum state unchanged) to quantify and classify entanglement in a way that identifies and characterizes important classes of states. Ongoing work studies the interplay of local symmetry with other types of symmetry and applications.
Faculty and students in the research group have won over one million dollars in competitive grant funding from the National Science Foundation, Arnold Experiential Grant Fund, and Lebanon Valley College. In addition to student-faculty research, these grants have supported student travel to conferences such as the Mathematical Association of America, where several students have presented. They supported research projects ranging from Symmetry, Entanglement, and Application to Structure and Local Equivalence of Stabilizers and States. The group’s work has also been published in prestigious science journals like Quantum. See a full list of publications below.
