How the third law limits our knowledge about quantum systems

Staff - Faculty of Informatics

Date: 20 February 2019 / 13:30 - 14:15

USI Lugano Campus, room A-34, Red building (Via G. Buffi 13)

Speaker:
Marcus Huber, Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information Vienna, Austria

Abstract:
The third law of thermodynamics can be phrased as an impossibility of cooling any physical system to absolute zero temperature. The projection postulate of quantum mechanics, however, predicts pure post-measurement states in idealised settings. We show how a self-contained treatment connects the two concepts and extends the impossibility of cooling to the impossibility of perfect measurements or Landauer erasure with finite thermodynamic resources.

Biography:
Marcus Huber is a group leader at IQOQI in Vienna. He has received his PhD from University of Vienna.
After, he has been a Marie-Curie Fellow at the University of Bristol, and held positions of the Universities of Geneva and the Universitat Autonoma di Barcelona.

Host: Prof. Stefan Wolf