Upcoming Colloquium 16 May

This coming Tuesday, ICTP will host physicist Wojciech Zurek for a Colloquium entitled "Decoherence and the Quantum Theory of the Classical." Professor Zurek works at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), New Mexico, USA, and will be addressing the ICTP community in Trieste and worldwide via livestream on Tuesday 16 May at 16:30.

Zurek will be speaking on the transition from quantum to classical physics. He is a leading expert on quantum theory, particularly decoherence and non-equilibrium dynamics of symmetry breaking with the resulting defect generation, which is known as the Kibble-Zurek mechanism. His overall talk will focus on how recent advances have helped clarify how the classical world is based on the quantum.

The lecture will be held in Budinich Lecture Hall, with light refreshments to be served afterwards. The abstract of the talk follows:

Zurek will describe three insights into the transition from quantum to classical. After a brief discussion of decoherence, he will give (i) a minimalist (and decoherence-free) derivation of preferred states. Such pointer states define events (e.g., measurement outcomes) without appealing to Born's rule. Probabilities and (ii) Born’s rule can be then derived from the symmetries of entangled quantum states. With probabilities at hand one can analyze information flows from the system to the environment in course of decoherence. They explain how (iii) robust classical reality arises from the quantum substrate by accounting for all the symptoms of objective existence of preferred pointer states of quantum systems through the redundancy of their records in the environment. Taken together, and in the right order, these three advances (i)-(iii) elucidate quantum origins of the classical.