[Physstaff] Colloquium: Wed 21/9/2106, "Harnessing the complexity of quantum many-body systems", Luca Tagliacozzo (Strathclyde)

[Daniel Oi]

To kick off the official 2016-17 John Anderson Colloquia series, our first speaker is Dr Luca Tagliacozzo who is a Chancellor's Fellow at the department. As usual, there will be tea/coffee afterwards in the common room.

Title: Harnessing the complexity of quantum many-body systems
Speaker: Dr Luca Tagliacozzo, SUPA Department of Physics, Strathclyde
Time/Date: 3pm Wed 21st September 2016
Venue: John Anderson JA3.14

Abstract:
Quantum many-body systems underlie our understanding of Nature. For example, an electric current of one Ampere for one second consists of around 10^18 electrons, and a laser beam involves a huge number of photons. In these systems both photons and electrons interact weakly and thus can be described as "independent" particles enabling us to correctly describe their behaviour.
What happens when a large number of constituents interact strongly? In most cases we don't know exactly but have observed that the emergent behaviour can be extremely different from that of the individual constituents alone. To use the words of the Nobel Laureate Phil Anderson, "more is different".
In the quest to describe emergent phenomena, we have recently understood that entanglement can be used as a guiding principle to characterize collective behaviour. In particular, I will discuss how understanding the structure of entanglement allows us to obtain an effective description of many-body systems in terms of tensor networks. This gives the unprecedented ability to compute the emerging properties of many-body quantum systems from first principles. I will conclude by addressing the issue about the existence of entanglement in the real world, by presenting recent results about a strategy to measure entanglement in experiments.

http://www.strath.ac.uk/science/physics/research/colloquia/

----
Dr Daniel K. L. Oi
Lecturer, Quantum Information
Computational Nonlinear & Quantum Optics
SUPA Department of Physics
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow G4 0NG
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 141 548 3112
Fax: +44 141 552 2891
Web: cnqo.phys.strath.ac.uk

The Department of Physics, University of Strathclyde, Rated No. 1 in the UK by the UK led Research Excellence Framework (REF2014).

The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, number SCO15263
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