Hello,
On Tuesday next week, we will have the follwing seminar talk in the
centre. Note that the
time is earlier than usual, due to Matthias Christandl's inaugural
lecture on the same day.
Best regards,
Stefan
________________________________________________________________________________________
Tuesday, 22nd of February, 15:30
Room: CAB H 53
Speaker: Adrian Hutter
Title:
The foundations of statistical physics from first principles of quantum
mechanics:
deriving equipartition from decoupling.
[semester project]
Abstract:
The postulate of equal a priori probability lies at the very foundations
of statistical
physics. It states that in equilibrium a system is equally likely to be
in any of the
states satisfying a certain constrain, like energy conservation.
Recently, Popescu
et al gave a major step towards the understanding of the postulate from
first principles
of quantum mechanics [1]. They consider a system in contact with a large
environment
and show that for almost any pure joint state, the reduced state of the
system is
consistent with the postulated equiprobable state; in other words, any
subsystem
of a sufficiently large system will appear to follow the postulate.
Using decoupling
theorems developed by Fred [2] we generalize this result and express it
in a form
that allows for further extension.
[1] S Popescu, A J. Short, A Winter, Entanglement and the Foundations of
Statistical
Mechanics. Nature Physics 2(11) 754-758 (2006).
[2] F. Dupuis, The decoupling approach to quantum information theory,
PhD thesis,
Université de Montréal (2009).
________________________________________________________________________________________