QUANTUM INFORMATION IN QUANTUM MANY BODY PHYSICS
Montreal, October 18-21 2011
Registration now open: http://www.crm.math.ca/Manybody11/index_e.php
Organizer: David Poulin, Sherbrooke
List of invited speakers:
Héctor Bombin (Perimeter Institute)
Sergey Bravyi (IBM Research)
Alioscia Hamma (Perimeter Institute)
Roger Melko (University of Waterloo)
Spiros Michalakis (IQI, Caltech)
Bruno Nachtergaele (University of California, Davis)
Tobias Osborne (Leibniz Universitat Hannover)
Anders Sandvik (Boston University)
Barbara Terhal (Physikzentrum, RWTH Aachen)
André-Marie Tremblay (Université de Sherbrooke)
Matthias Troyer (ETH Zürich)
Many recent developments in the theory of quantum information have led to important insights and applications in condensed matter physics. For instance, the theory of entanglement has shed new light on the density matrix renormalisation and the real space renormalization numerical methods, culminating in a deeper understanding of the strengths of the methods and applications to a wider class of problems including critical systems and systems in more than one spatial dimension. Similarly, the theory of quantum error correction has led to new classes of theoretical models of interacting particles that exhibits topological order, an exotic phase of matter where excitation can have non-Abelian statistics. The study of information propagation in a system of interacting particles was used to prove the existence of an entanglement entropy area law in the ground state of systems with local interactions. The problem of finding ground states of a system composed of interacting particles was proven to be complete for the complexity class QMA, the quantum analogue of NP. These are just a few examples illustrating the connections between quantum information and condensed matter physics.
The purpose of this workshop will be to bring together some of the world’s leading experts in quantum information and condensed matter physics with interests in the connections between the two fields. This will represent a opportunity to deepen our understandings of the connections between these fields and to tackle important open questions such as the quantum analogue of the probabilistically checkable proof (PCP) theorem and the existence of self-correcting phases of matter.
