Pauli Lectures 2024
The Wolfgang Pauli Lectures 2024 will be dedicated to Physics.
Professor John Preskill
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA
John Preskill is the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and Director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech. Preskill received his Ph.D. in physics in 1980 from Harvard, and joined the Caltech faculty in 1983. Preskill began his career in particle physics and cosmology, but since the mid-1990s his main research area has been quantum information science; he is especially intrigued by the ways our deepening understanding of quantum information and quantum computing can be applied to other fundamental issues in physics, such as the quantum structure of space and time.
Quantum Computing and the Entanglement Frontier
Tuesday, September 17, 2024, 17.00 h (Apéro after the lecture)
Auditorium Maximum, HG F 30, ETH Zentrum, Rämistrasse 101, Zurich
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The quantum laws governing atoms and other tiny objects seem to defy common sense, and information encoded in quantum systems has weird properties that baffle our feeble human minds. John Preskill will explain why he loves quantum entanglement, the elusive feature making quantum information fundamentally different from information in the macroscopic world. By exploiting quantum entanglement, quantum computers should be able to solve otherwise intractable problems, with far-reaching applications to cryptology, materials, and fundamental physical science. Preskill is less weird than a quantum computer, and easier to understand.
Learning in a Quantum World
Wednesday, September 18, 2024, 16.45 h
Lecture Hall, HPV G 4, ETH Hönggerberg, Robert-Gnehm-Weg 15, Zurich
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We live in a quantum world, yet we are classical beings, and sometimes our classical nature impedes our ability to interact with, learn from, and understand the underlying quantum reality. I'll describe recently developed methods for improving our ability to learn about the quantum world using both classical machines and quantum machines. With these tools, we can predict and verify properties of exotic many-particle systems, and unlock facets of nature that would otherwise be deeply concealed.
Finding Local Minima and Certifying Quantum States
Thursday, September 19, 2024, 16.45 h
Lecture Hall, HPV G 4, ETH Hönggerberg, Robert-Gnehm-Weg 15, Zurich
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I’ll describe two recent results from our group at Caltech. (1) Finding local minima of the energy in quantum systems is quantumly easy and classically hard. (2) Single-qubit measurements suffice for efficiently certifying that a state in the lab is close to a desired target state.
References: (1) Local minima in quantum systems, Chi-Fang Chen, Hsin-Yuan Huang, John Preskill, Leo Zhou, arXiv:2309.16596. (2) Certifying almost all quantum states with few single-qubit measurements, Hsin-Yuan Huang, John Preskill, Mehdi Soleimanifar, arXiv:2404.07281.