Category: Announcement

After John Preskill’s call for more quantum participation at the APS March Meeting, I couldn’t say no to a request for a blurb about quantum info and foundations! The following is a guest post by Giulio Chiribella.
Following up the previous post by John Preskill, I’d like draw your attention to the focus session “Quantum Information for Quantum Foundations” which will take place at the APS March Meeting 2012.
If you are interested in the conceptual and fundamental aspects of Quantum Information, this is the right session for you to come and present your work! The event promises to be lively and stimulating, and will be a great occasion to advertise your recent results.
On top of that, your participation will give an important support to foundational research.The foundational space at the March meeting is a great opportunity for our community.  But it is vital to keep this space alive, responding with a visible participation and presenting talks on the best of the foundational research in Quantum Information. This is not hard to do: Over the past few years there has been an enormous amount of progresses and a burst of new exciting results at the interface between Quantum Information and Foundations.  Also, we should not forget of the numerous results in Quantum Information that, even without being explicitly foundational, continue to shed a bright light on the operational features of Quantum Theory.   It is enough to have such a vibrant scientific landscape represented next March in Boston to make the foundational session memorable!
This year’s session will start with an invited talk by Valerio Scarani, who will summarize the main ideas and the latest developments on Information Causality. Valerio’s talk will be followed by a lineup of contributed talks, which hopefully would be as many and as lively as the talks of last year’s edition, organized by Chris Fuchs, which has been a very successful event.
To participate to the session, you can submit your abstract at the webpage http://www.aps.org/meetings/abstract/index.cfm. (don’t forget that the deadline for submissions is this Friday November 11th 2011!)
A last remark before concluding:  Chatting with colleagues sometimes I noticed that potential speakers are discouraged by the 12 minutes format, which seems too short to present all the relevant details. We should remind, however, that presenting details is not really the point here: The APS Meetings are huge events where the whole physics community meets to highlight advancements and to advertise new ideas across fields, not to address the specialists of one particular field.  The format of the March Meeting talks is designed to rapidly advertise new results, and if you discover that you would like to know more about one particular result…  well, during the meeting there is a lot of free time where you can interact directly (and more efficiently)  with the speaker about the details of her/his work.
So, let us take the event in the right spirit and make the foundational space at the March Meeting a real exciting forum for the exchange of new ideas!
Hope to see many of you in Boston!