News & Events

  • Symmetry Breaking and Critical Scaling in Ultracold Quantum Gases

    April 1, 2014

    Driving a physical system abruptly through a continuous phase transition leads to a variety of interesting physical phenomena, including spontaneous formation of topological defects such as solitons, vortex lines, and monopoles. This is a universal phenomenon which is relevant to systems as diverse as ultra-cold quantum fluids and the cooling of the universe shortly after a `hot big bang'. The critical behavior of these systems is not determined by local dynamics, but rather by universal scaling laws arising from key global parameters (e.g.

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  • Topological Quantum Matter

    April 1, 2014

    Topological phases of matter are distinguished by a form of quantum order that cannot be characterized in terms of any local order parameter. A most striking manifestation of topological order is the emergence of topologically protected zero-energy boundary modes that are otherwise not realized in Nature. For a topological superconductor, in particular, such emergent quasi-particles coincide with their own anti-particles, naturally embodying elusive quantum objects known as "Majorana fermions".

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  • Many-Body Quantum Chaos and Quantum Thermodynamics

    April 1, 2014

    Understanding and justifying the emergence of equilibrium behavior in generic, non-integrable many-body quantum systems is a longstanding challenge at the very heart of statistical mechanics. We are exploring how concepts and tools from quantum information theory may be used to build a consistent theoretical framework for describing ergodicity and mixing properties in many-body quantum systems that lack a natural classical counterpart, and to characterize distinctive aspects of complex quantum dynamics.

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  • Entanglement and Quantum Correlations

    April 1, 2014

    Entanglement provides a distinctively quantum type of correlation that has no analogue in classical statistical mechanics. Despite much progress, a satisfactory understanding of the nature and properties of quantum correlations in composite quantum systems, and the extent to which different kinds of correlations may be a resource for quantum information tasks is far from being reached.

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  • Dynamics and Control of Open Quantum Systems

    April 1, 2014

    Precisely characterizing and controlling the states and dynamics of realistic open quantum systems is a fundamental challenge across quantum science and engineering, and a prerequisite for harnessing the potential of quantum information processing. We are investigating a range of problems in quantum control from both a general system-theoretic perspective as well as in collaboration with experimentalists working on trapped-ion and solid-state qubit implementations.

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