Speaker: 
Federico Carollo - Universität Tübingen

Title: 
Absorbing state phase transitions in open quantum systems and quantum cellular automata

Abstract:
A paradigmatic setting for the study of nonequilibrium phenomena is that of stochastic processes featuring absorbing states, i.e., configurations which, once reached during the dynamics, cannot be left. These systems typically follow elementary rules – for instance describing the dynamics of epidemic spreading – but display intriguingly complex nonequilibrium behaviour. In classical settings, a famous conjecture asserts that generic models with a single absorbing state display emergent physics in the directed percolation universality class. In this seminar, I will present open quantum models possessing absorbing states and show how quantum effects can alter the universal behaviour of these systems and even give rise to new types of absorbing state phase transitions, without a classical counterpart. Furthermore, I will discuss how ``minimal"" models for analysing this new phenomenology can be constructed via quantum versions of cellular automata.  

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QuCoLiMa Talks are regular seminars of the collaborative research center TRR 306 QuCoLiMa (Quantum Cooperativity of Light and Matter), where (external) experts are invited to present their work.

More information at www.qucolima.de/talks