Prof. Luiz Davidovich, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

"From Quantum to Classical: Schrödinger Cats, Entanglement, and Decoherence"

Coffee and cookies will be served at 3:45pm in RLM 4.102

Abstract: The emergence of the classical world from quantum mechanics is a subtle problem, which was raised by Schrödinger in one of his papers in 1926, and to which he came back in a paper in 1935, containing the famous discussion on coherent superpositions of classically distinguishable states of macroscopic systems ("Schrödinger cat"). The dynamical process by which these superpositions are transformed into a mixture of the two states, due to the interaction between the system and the environment, has been the subject of many theoretical investigations, and it has also been experimentally probed. A closely related question concerns the dynamics of entangled systems under the action of the environment. What is the dynamical law? How does it scale with the number of particles? What is the impact on the environment? These questions are not only important from a conceptual point-of-view, but play an important role in the assessment of the robustness of quantum computers. This talk will review recent work, theoretical and experimental, addressing these questions.