Physics and Astronomy Calendar

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 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 becomes essential to understand wave interference in order to find this Shannon limit for modern communication systems. It becomes 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 howinformation capacity is limited. We find the question of
information can be reduced to a random matrix problem which is attacked with traditional condensed matter field theory methods. Finally we bring the story full-circle by deducing new insights about mesoscopics from our results on wireless communications.