Date: Friday 16 September 2011, 4:30pm
Location: Elizabethtown College, Esbenshade Hall Room 382
 Speaker: David Lyons, Lebanon Valley College 
   Title: Classifying entanglement for symmetric states of $n$ quantum bits

Abstract. We consider the problem of entanglement classification
for multiqubit quantum states, interest in which is motivated by
spectacular applications to computation and communication in addition to
new insight into foundational questions in quantum mechanics. In
mathematical terms, the question is about classifying orbits of finite
dimensional Lie group actions on finite dimensional vector spaces. We
discuss why this is interesting, why this is hard, and recent results
for the special case of states that remain invariant under permutation
of qubits. We present an analysis based on the elegant geometric picture
of symmetric states called the Majorana representation.