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
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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).
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