IQIM Postdoctoral and Graduate Student Seminar

Abstract: ** Please note the special time this week only - the IQIM seminar will begin at 2:30 pm **

Small scales are increasingly controllable in experiments and technologies. Such settings involve statistical mechanical concepts, such as work, heat, and entropy. Heat dissipation threatens miniaturized transistors, and the work required to stretch single DNA molecules has been measured. Yet statistical mechanics describes large systems. Two mathematical toolkits developed in quantum information theory marry statistical mechanics with small scales. Thermodynamic resource theories and one-shot information theory have exploded in popularity recently. The time is ripe to realize their potential with real physical systems. I will explain why while introducing these toolkits. I will discuss which aspects of them need realizing and via what steps we can shift them toward experiments.

Reference: http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03873