Events

Where are the branches in a many-body wavefunction?

Jess Riedel, Perimeter Institute

When the wavefunction of a macroscopic system (such as the universe) unitarily evolves from a low-entropy initial state, we expect that it develops quasiclassical "branches", i.e., a decomposition into orthogonal components each taking well-defined, distinct values for macroscopic observables. Is this decomposition unique? Can the number of branches decrease in time?

Quantum thermodynamics - a review

Jonathan Oppenheim, University College London

I review recent results in quantum thermodynamics. This includes the emergence of many second laws at the micro-scale, fully quantum fluctuation relations for work and for states, a proof of the third law of thermodynamics applicable to erasing a bit of memory, and a grand canonical ensemble for non-commuting conserved quantities. Progress has been made using tools from quantum information theory.

Quantum information in tensor networks

Michael Walter, Stanford University

In this talk, we explore how quantum information is encoded in tensor networks. To this end, we study the properties of random tensor networks with large bond dimension. We find that, from the perspective of quantum information theory, entanglement emerges from the geometry of the network by a multipartite entanglement distillation process.

Tomas Jochym-O'connor of the Department of Physics and Astronomy is defending his thesis:

Novel Methods in Quantum Error Correction

Thomas is supervised by Professor Raymond Laflamme.

Sarah Kaiser of the Department of Physics and Astronomy will be defending her thesis:

Quantum Key Distribution Devices: How to make them and how to break them

Sarah is supervised by Associate Professor Thomas Jennewein.

Extended nonlocal games and monogamy-of-entanglement games

Vincent Russo, Institute for Quantum Computing

Two-player one-round games have served to be an instrumental model in theoretical computer science. Likewise, nonlocal games consider this model when the players have access to an entangled quantum state. In this talk, I will consider a broader class of nonlocal games (extended-nonlocal games), where the referee shares an entangled state along with the players.

Kent Fisher of the Department of Physics and Astronomy is defending his thesis:

Photons & Phonons: A room-temperature diamond quantum memory

Kent is supervised by Professor Kevin Resch.