Speaker: Tom Iadecola

NOTE DIFFERENT LOCATION - Physics 003

Host: James Vary

Title: Dynamics of Quantum Information: From Chaos to Control

Abstract: Statistical mechanics predicts that an isolated quantum system, left to evolve on its own, will eventually reach a late-time steady state whose properties depend only on macroscopic properties of the initial state (e.g., its total energy or particle number). The process of relaxation toward this late-time state, during which microscopic information about the initial state is lost, is known as thermalization. A vibrant research field has emerged over the last decade that aims to determine when a strongly interacting quantum system can avoid thermalization. I will discuss one example, known as quantum many-body scars, whose theoretical development followed a surprising 2017 quantum simulation experiment. While undoubtedly fascinating, many-body scars and many other "failure modes" of quantum thermalization tend to exhibit only a weak stability to perturbations. I will discuss how insights from the theory of classical dynamical systems may provide a route to stabilizing such phenomena, providing a potential route to harnessing them for applications in quantum technologies.