Physical Society Colloquium
Interview for Faculty Position
The Unexpected Physics in Modern Wireless
Communication:
Replicas, Diffusons, and Supersymmetry for fun and profit
Steven Simon
Lucent Technologies
In the modern information era, where the demand for higher bit-rate seems to
be increasing without bound, it is essential to understand the physical
limits on wireless communications. I will start by reviewing the concept of a
Shannon limit of how many bits per second can be conveyed from a transmitter
to a receiver. We then discover that in a disordered environment (in a city,
for example) it is essential to understand wave interference in order to find
this Shannon limit. It is advantageous to make an analogy between radio waves
in cities and electron waves in disordered metals. Using our understanding of
mesoscopics we can understand more about how information capacity is
limited. Analogous to mesoscopics, the question of information can be
reduced to a random matrix problem which is attacked with traditional
condensed matter methods such as supersymmetry, replicas, and large N
expansion.
Wednesday, March 5th 2003, 16:00
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, R.E. Bell Conference Room (room 103)
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