Today: ICTP Colloquium: "Decoherence and the Quantum Theory of the Classical", by Prof. Wojciech Zurek, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)

[Infopoint]

Dear All,

ICTP is pleased to announce that *today, Tuesday 16 May, *the ICTP 
Colloquium, " Decoherence and the Quantum Theory of the Classical", by 
Prof. Wojciech Zurek, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), New Mexico, 
USA ,will take place**at 16:30 hrs, in the Budinich Lecture Hall, 
Leonardo Building, ICTP.

BIOSKETCH: Wojciech Hubert Zurek is a leading authority on quantum 
theory, especially decoherence and non-equilibrium dynamics of symmetry 
breaking and resulting defect generation (known as the Kibble-Zurek 
mechanism). He was educated in Kraków, Poland and Austin, Texas (Ph.D. 
1979). He spent two years at Caltech as a Tolman Fellow. In 1984 he 
started at Los Alamos as Oppenheimer Fellow, and was elected Laboratory 
Fellow in 1996. He was an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute 
and co-organized the Quantum Coherence and Decoherence and the Quantum 
Computing and Chaos programs at UCSB's Institute for Theoretical 
Physics. In 2005 he received the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, in 2009 
Marian Smoluchowski Medal (highest prize of the Polish Physical 
Society), and in 2010 Albert Einstein Professorship Prize of the Ulm 
University. Among the books are Quantum theory and Measurement (1983, 
co-edited with John Wheeler) and Complexity, Entropy, and Physics of 
Information (1990).

ABSTRACT: Prof. 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.

The abstract of the talk is available at http://indico.ictp.it/event/8216/

The Colloquium will be livestreamed at http://video.ictp.it/livestream

The poster is attached.

Light refreshments will be served after the lecture.

You are all very warmly invited to attend.

Office of the Director, ICTP

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