Invited speakers

We have also organised sessions that will guide in your next step, whether in academia, in a start-up, or elsewhere in industry. Another series of speakers are invited from COST Action MP1209 (Thermodynamics in the Quantum Regime), which makes this workshop a unique networking opportunity, bringing together two COST Actions.

Inside Nature Materials

Dr. Maria Marakou – Associate editor, Nature Materials

Since its launch in 2002, Nature Materials remains a leading journal in the field of materials science across many disciplines, aiming at publishing cutting edge science for the relevant scientific communities as well as disseminating exciting results among the wider readership of materials scientists. This talk will describe how these principles shape the editorial process in Nature Materials and other journals within the Nature family, amidst a rapidly changing scientific publishing landscape, underlining the key points from submission of original research papers to publication.

 

Funding Opportunities in Horizon 2020

Anthea Fabri – Horizon 2020 National Coordinator

The presentation will focus on EU funding opportunities available in Horizon 2020 for Early Stage Researchers. Particular emphasis will be made on 2 specific programmes within Horizon 2020 – Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) and the European Research Council (ERC).

 

Conjugating entrepreneurship and research for fun and profit

Dr. Simone De Liberato – Marie Curie fellow, co-founder of a start-up, University of Southampton

I will use the time of this talk to tell you something about my experience in-between academia and entrepreneurship. I will try to focus both on the more mundane problems of funding, building a team, and managing bureaucracy, and on the more subtle change in perspective needed to successfully conjugate those two worlds.

 

Analyzing Peer Review

Dr. Manolis Antonoyiannakis – Associate editor of Physical Review B 

I will present an insider’s view on peer review drawing from my experience at the journals of the American Physical Society (Physical Review B, Physical Review Letters, and Physical Review X) where I have worked since 2003. First, I will discuss the basic elements of peer review (editorial screening, rejection without external review, referee selection, consultation with Editorial Board Members, assessment of referee reports, handling of conflicting referee recommendations, selection of a subset of accepted papers for highlighting). In the process, I will present some commonly used arguments by authors that can actually backfire, and some anecdotal excerpts of correspondence. Second, I will discuss some recent trends in science publishing, from launching new journals to providing new services to authors. I will focus on one recent trend, the highlighting of select sets of papers by publishers. Third, I will discuss citation impact metrics for journals (Impact Factor, EigenFactor, h5 index) and for subsets of journals (e.g., Editors’ Suggestions, papers highlighted in APS Physics, etc.). This leads naturally to the questions (a) whether editors and referees can pick out, at the time of acceptance, the papers destined to be highly cited or otherwise influential; and (b) whether such papers tend to be controversial at the time of publication and after. I will present some data on these questions. Overall, my aim is for the audience to appreciate the imperfect and imprecise nature of editorial decision-making that is sometimes unappreciated by a community trained in the hard sciences. Finally, for the benefit of the younger audience, I will present a brief outline of the editorial job and career prospects of editors. 

 

Numerical studies of out-of-equilibrium systems with Tensor Networks

Mari Carmen Bañuls – Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Garching 

Tensor network states have proven successful in describing ground states of quantum many body systems. The paradigmatic example is that of Matrix Product States (MPS), which underlie the celebrated DMRG method for the study of one dimensional systems. Using these methods it is also possible to simulate dynamics of pure quantum states. But MPS can be also extended to describe operators. This allows for different ways of numerically exploring out-of-equilibrium problems. For instance, we can study the steady state of a dissipative quantum system. Or we can construct the operators that exhibit the slowest dynamics in a given non-integrable problem.

 

Optical control and cooling of nanoparticles in vacuum: towards testing high-mass quantum physics

James Millen – Quantum Nanophysics group, University of Vienna

By controlling nanoscale objects on the level where quantum effects become evident we can explore the limits of quantum physics. For example, we could test collapse models, whereby external influences such as gravity or fundamental noise prevents massive objects from being in a quantum superposition. By bringing the nanoscale object into the gas phase, and controlling it with light, we remove sources of noise and decoherence that are present in solid-state experiments. By cooling the motion of free nanospheres with the field of an optical cavity, we aim to perform interferometry in an entirely new mass regime.

It is not only the centre-of-mass motion that we can measure and control with light. We launch nanofabricated Silicon nanorods through an optical cavity and observe rotation rates of tens of MHz. The light in the cavity exerts a torque on the motion of the nanorods, and there is a coupling between the rotational and centre-of-mass motions, which we can measure with high-resolution. We will potentially be able to control and cool the rotational motion. Finally, to cool to the level where we can perform quantum experiments, we have developed arrays of open silicon microcavities with mode volumes of a few tens-of-femtolitres. This tiny mode volume will provide strong coupling between the light and the nanoparticles, and the ability to cool in several stages makes interferometry with masses over 10^6 amu feasible.

 

The thermodynamics of quantum information processing

Philipp Kammerlander – ETH Zürich

How much heat is dissipated in a quantum computer? Just how small can thermal engines be? When does a system act as a heat bath towards a quantum device? As technology miniaturizes, we find that some approaches of traditional thermodynamics are inadequate to study heat and work in the regime of the very small. There are several aspects to this change, such as finite-size effects, subjectivity of information, emergence of quantum effects, the growing importance of correlations between small systems, and the fact that we are normally interested in single-shot results, as opposed to averages over a large number of experiments.

To tackle these challenges, a new theory of quantum thermodynamics is emerging, drawing from insights of  quantum information theory.  Quantum information theory has given us tools to model knowledge of quantum systems explicitly: we use it to analyse the security of cryptographic protocols, or how much information can be sent through a noisy channel, for example. In this talk, I will explore the connection between information theory and thermodynamics. We will start with the classic example of Maxwell's demon, and build up to the work cost of erasure of quantum information.

 

COST

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