Workshop Sypnosis

Both quantum information theory and many-body physics deal essentially with the complex quantum correlations arising between a large number of sub-units. It is thus inevitable that important new insights have come with the pooling of ideas between the two fields, as well as very new kinds of experimental investigation of many-body systems. The present workshop will concentrate on the following themes:

Quantum Simulation and Many-Body Physics: Using small quantum computers one can imagine 'hard-wiring' interesting many-body Hamiltonians and experimentally investigating their spectra and dynamics. It may be desirable to engineer errors to investigate the response of the system to perturbations. This also opens the way to 'quantum engineering' of systems hard to realise in Nature.

Quantum Walks: Originally invented as a way of developing new algorithms for quantum information processing, quantum walks are also of key interest in the simulation of many-body systems. The mapping of many-body and/or quantum information systems to quantum walks promises to be a powerful tool for analysis of their dynamics.

Quantum Phase Transitions: Quantum phase transitions can involve entanglement at the many-particle level, and are of fundamental interest in many areas of physics (currently in the context of strongly-correlated systems and the physics of the early universe). Important new questions have arisen about the dynamics of quantum phase transitions, in a variety of different systems.

Low-dimensional quantum systems: The realisation that methods from quantum information can give information on 1-dimensional quantum spin systems has initiated several new lines of thought in both fields. Current work focusses on entanglement entropy and the use of exact methods in the study of spin chains and related systems.

Topological Quantum Fluids: The problem of understanding this new class of many-body systems, with its radically different eigenstates and physical properties, began with the discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect. Current work focuses on possible topological spin liquids, and the development of topological quantum computations with networks made from real spins or optical lattices.

Quantum nanomechanical systems: These lie at the interface between the quantum and classical world. At milliKelvin temperatures and GHz frequencies, they behave as mesoscopic quantum mechanical objects. They have may application to high precision measurement, and are also important tools for probing decoherence, measurement and control at the quantum/classical boundary.