Quantum correlations and irreversibility

Abstract

The concept of irreversibility is among the most important in thermodynamics. Even though they have been developed initially for macroscopic systems, there is currently a great effort from the scientific community in extending these ideas to micro and mesoscopic systems. However, despite recent advances, there are still several open questions. The main problem to be studied in this project refers to measures of irreversibility in quantum systems, for which there is currently no unified formalism. Quantifying irreversibility in a quantum process is a relevant problem for several applications, in particular in quantum computing, since such measures are directly related to the efficiency of a process. We propose to study this problem, focusing on the specific case of Gaussian quantum states. Such states appeared recently in the literature as an alternative to quantum computation, since they have a series of interesting properties and are easier to manipulate analytically. The proposal in this project, which is a direct continuation of the research being developed in the group of Prof. Gabriel T. Landi, will be divided in two parts. The first consists in characterizing irreversibility in general Gaussian maps, Markovian or not. Then, in the send part, we shall try to relate these measures with concepts of interest in quantum information, such as entanglement, discord, loss of coherent and loss of information. (AU)