CQS Seminar: Pseudorandomness and Thermal Equilibrium in the Quantum World

How does thermodynamic equilibrium emerge from the reversible, coherent dynamics of quantum many-body systems? This question is key to the foundations of statistical mechanics and has been a subject of intense theoretical study for decades. Today, programmable quantum simulators and quantum computers offer new ways to address this question experimentally, prompting the development of novel theoretical frameworks. In this talk I will give an overview of our recent work on two such frameworks that employ ideas related to 'pseudorandomness' from quantum information theory. Our results highlight the subtle roles of entanglement, randomness, and the observer's computational resources in characterizing thermal equilibrium in programmable quantum matter, with possible applications in various quantum information processing tasks.

We hope you can make it!