Foundations of quantum thermodynamics

Schedule:

All talks start at 09.00, and take place in one of the seminar rooms in the new building, or in one of the discussion rooms.

Date: Topic: Speaker:
Thursday 17 May Maxwell's demon and the Szilard engine (Topic 1) Juan Carlos Correia
Friday 1 June The Brownian ratchet (Topic 4) Sakshi Khaiwal
Thursday 7 June How small can a fridge be? (Topic 9) Ankita Negi
Thursday 21 June Eigenstate thermalization (Topic 10) Saurabh Kumar
Friday 22 June Negative entropy in quantum information theory (Topic 11) Paula Belzig
Thursday 5 July Negative entropy in quantum thermodynamics (Topic 12) Angelos Bampounis
Friday 6 July Entanglement and the foundations of statistical mechanics (Topic 8) Nikhil Sharma
Thursday 12 July The second laws of quantum thermodynamics (Topic 20) Changjun Yeo
Friday 13 July Quantum fluctuation thorems (Topic 16) Mugdha Zadkar

Contact:

If you have any questions, contact Johan Aberg.

Content:

Ideas from both classical and quantum information theory has inspired several approaches to understand and analyze the foundations of thermodynamics. In this seminar we will explore various topics in this area.

Some potential topics:

  • The history of Maxwell's Demon
  • Szilard's engine
  • Landauer's erasure principle
  • Entropy in information theory and statistical mechanics
  • Negative quantum entropy
  • Entanglement and the foundations of statistical mechanics
  • Eigenstate thermalization hypothesis
  • The resource theory of athermality
  • Lieb-Yngvason's axiomatic thermodynamics

More concrete topics:

You can find a collection of more concrete suggestions for topics here . This list includes subjects based both on classical and quantum physics.

Organizers:

Johan Aberg and David Gross