Foundations of quantum mechanics and their impact on contemporary society

Gerardo Adesso is fascinated by the elusive border between quantum and classical descriptions of the world. He got his PhD in Physics at University of Salerno (Italy) in 2007, working on characterisation and applications of entanglement in continuous variable quantum systems. After a post-doctoral experience at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain), he joined University of Nottingham as a Lecturer in 2009. His recent research has been pioneering in unveiling resources for quantum technology that are more general and robust than entanglement, challenging the two-decade-old separability paradigm. Gerardo is now a Professor of Mathematical Physics at Nottingham and leads a research team working on all aspects of quantum correlations and coherence (http://quantumcorrelations.weebly.com), supported by an ERC Starting Grant and further awards from Royal Society and Foundational Questions Institute. His current interests extend to more applied subjects ranging from quantum information & communication technologies to sensing & metrology, thermodynamics, and beyond.

Philippe Grangier is head of the Quantum Optics group at Institut d'Optique in Palaiseau, France, and Professor at Ecole Polytechnique. He started his research activity in 1980, on experimental tests of Bell’s inequalities, with Alain Aspect as advisor. Then he worked on single-photon interferences (PhD thesis), and interferometry using squeezed light (postdoc in Bell Labs, 1987). After creating his own group, he realised a series of quantum optics experiment during the 1990’s, including optical QND measurements. Then from 2000 he performed many experiments related to Quantum Information Processing: single atom qubits in microscopic optical tweezers, quantum cryptography using single photons or continuous variables, entanglement control in atomic and photonic quantum states. He authored more than 200 publications, and his achievements have been recognised by many national and international awards, including an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist. He was born in Verona, Italy, has worked in several university in Italy; the US and France and is currently directing the quantum gravity group of the Centre de Physique Theorique de Luminy in Marseille.   He is member of the Institut Universitaire de France and the International Academy for the Philosophy of Science. Among his honors are the Xanthopoulos Prize, the honorary Professorship at the Normal University of Beijing and and the Laurea Honoris Causa of the University of Saint Martin in Buenos Aires.  His main contributions are in Loop Quantum Gravity, on the foundations of Quantum Mechanics and on the study of Time. He has also published for the large public: his book Seven Brief Lesson on Physics, in particular, has been translated in more than 40 languages.

Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano is full professor of Theoretical Physics at Pavia University, and leader of the Quantum Information Theory Group “QUit”. He teaches Quantum Mechanics and Foundations of Quantum Theory. He is Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Optical Society of America, member of the Academy Istituto Lombardo of Scienze e Lettere, of the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing at Northwestern IL, and of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi). 

Mauro pioneered quantum information in Italy and later, with his disciples Chiribella and Perinotti, he derived Quantum Theory from information-theoretic principles, the topic of a book published by Cambridge. More recently he has opened the way to extend the informational paradigm to the derivation of Quantum Field Theory. Mauro is also actively interacting with philosophers, aimed at creating a "Milano circle" on philosophy of science, with strong focus on scientific method and the issue of realism.

Reinhard F Werner is currently Physics professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Leibniz University Hannover. He is interested in the conceptual and mathematical foundations of quantum theory. Anything, in which the structure of quantum mechanics plays a non-trivial role. In recent years, he has mostly applied his interests in quantum information theory, but also quantum statistical mechanics and the theory of time in quantum mechanics. As a mathematical physicist, he also tries to answer questions regarding generally observed features of the theory, like for instance the approach of equilibrium in macroscopic systems, at their appropriate level of generality. He is the recipient of the International Quantum Communication Award, for for his foundational contributions to the field of quantum information: especially quantum entanglement and nonlocality, quantum Shannon theory, quantum memory channels, and quantum cellular automata.

Wojciech Hubert Zurek was educated in Kraków, Poland  and Austin, Texas  (PhD 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).

Joan Vaccaro is a physicist at Griffith University. Her research interests encompass a range of topics in quantum physics. She is naturally attracted to deeper conceptual issues but she also maintains an active interest in developing practical applications such as efficient energy storage systems. Her most challenging research project, however, is the physics of time. Although time has been a subject of contemplation since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, there have been few advances in our understanding of the physical nature of time itself. The only significant advances to the way that time is represented in physics are by Isaac Newton in the 1600’s and Albert Einstein in the early 1900’s. An experimental verification of a measurable signature of Joan’s quantum formalism of time would push our understanding one step further.

Giuseppe Compagno, got his degree in Physics (cum Laude) at the University of Palermo where he is currently Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics. Initially his research was in X-ray Astrophysics (at American Science and Engineering (ASE) of Cambridge, Mass. directed by R. Giacconi). Then, he worked in Quantum Optics (dynamics of coherent states of matter and radiation in interaction and resonance fluorescence) and Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) where developed the theory of atoms dressed by vacuum fluctuations. He is co-author of the book: “Atom Field Interactions and Dressed Atoms”, Cambridge University Press (1995). He has also worked  on the problem of measurement, localization and causality in QED and Quantum Field Theory. Successively he focused on the decoherence of matter-radiation interaction, showing the revivals of entanglement in systems within non-Markovian environments. Recently he has developed a non-standard approach to deal with identical particles end their entanglement.

Andreas Winter received a Diploma degree in Mathematics from Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, in 1997, and a Dr. math. degree from the Fakultät für Mathematik, Bielefeld University, Germany, in 1999. He was Research Associate at Bielefeld University, and from 2001 with the Department of Computer Science at University of Bristol, UK In 2003, still with University of Bristol, he was appointed Lecturer in Mathematics, and in 2006 Professor of Physics of Information. Since 2012 he is ICREA Research Professor with the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. He is the recipient of a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2007), a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2009) and the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society (2012).

Andreas Winter's scientific interests revolve around quantum information theory and discrete mathematics, in particular quantum Shannon theory. He is the originator of several technical and conceptual innovations in that field, among them the discovery of state merging as a primitive and the meaning of negative information; the application of geometric measure concentration in quantum information and statistical mechanics; the development of a matrix tail bound à la Bernstein with numerous applications in information theory, signal processing and combinatorics; techniques towards strong converses and "pretty strong" converses in quantum Shannon theory; quantum entropy inequalities; and the development of zero-error quantum information theory, including an interpretation of the Lovász number as the zero-error capacity of a graph assisted by no-signalling correlations.

Caslav Brukner is Full Professor for “Quantum foundations and quantum information theory” at the University of Vienna, Austria and the director of the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna (IQOQI-Vienna). He received his MSc degree in Physics from the University of Vienna (1995) and earned a Doctor of Technical Sciences from the Vienna University of Technology (1999). He has held positions at the Imperial College London (Marie Curie Fellow, 2004),  Tsinghua University in Beijing (Chair Professor, 2005-2008), University of Belgrade, Serbia (Visiting Professor, since 2008) and at the International Institute of Physics in Natal, Brazil (Distinguished Visiting Full Professorship, since 2017). His primary research interests are foundations of quantum physics and quantum information theory. He contributed to information-theoretical reconstruction of quantum mechanics, research on the quantum-to-classical transition, derivation of the general Bell inequality, and more recently, to formulation of quantum mechanics on indefinite causal structures.

Born in Winnipeg, Canada, and having William received his PhD under John Wheeler at Princeton University. For the past 40 years William has been on the faculty at the University of British Columbia. His research interests concentrate on the overlap between quantum mechanics and gravity. He is best known for his discovery that, in a quantum field theory, what a particle is depends on the state of motion of the observer, with an accelerated observer seeing the vacuum as populated with a thermal bath of particles.

Lídia del Rio is a senior scientist in quantum information, quantum thermodynamics and quantum foundations at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland. She was lucky to have been born in Portugal in 1986 and benefiting from a free public education system. She did her masters degree in physics at the University of Aveiro with Ricardo Dias and a PhD in Renato Renner's group at ETH Zurich, followed by a postdoc at University of Bristol, in Sandu Popescu's group. She co-founded and co-runs Quantum, the open journal for quantum science. Lídia moonlights as a tango dancer, vegan activist and tree climber, though usually not all three at once.

Alexia Auffèves got a master of theoretical physics and a degree in philosophy before doing her PhD at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel in Pr. Serge Haroche's group (2000-2004). There she experimentally worked on the foundations of quantum physics, by growing Shrödinger cat states in a microwave cavity. After a technological post-doc in Institut des Nanonechnologies de Lyon, she was hired by CNRS in 2005 to conduct quantum optics experiments with quantum dots. She was then slowly caught back by theory and started revisiting quantum optics in the solid-state, in close collaborations with top level experimental groups.  Since 2013, she has developed a strong interest in quantum thermodynamics and how it relates to quantum optics, the foundations of quantum mechanics and the nature of randomness.

Barbara Terhal is a professor at QuTech and the EEMCS Dept. of the Delft University of Technology since 2017. Before that, she was a professor in Theoretical Physics at RWTH Aachen University (2010-2017) and a research staff member at the IBM Watson Research Center, NY, USA (2002-2010). She has been working in quantum information theory since her PhD in 1999, developing quantum information protocols, researching the complexity of quantum computation and advancing the field of quantum error correction and fault-tolerance. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a distinguished visiting research chair at Perimeter Institute (Canada).

Professor Braunstein joined the University of York, in 2003 and is heading a group in quantum computation. He received his PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1988.

Professor Braunstein received a prestigious Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award. He was awarded the honorary title of 2001 Lord Kelvin Lecturer and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Physics and the Optical Society of America. Before joining the University of York, he held a Humboldt Fellowship (spent at the University of Ulm).

He is editor of three books "Quantum Computing, "Scalable Quantum Computing" and "Quantum Information with Continuous Variables" and serves on the editorial board of the journal Fortschritte der Physik. He initiated and is a Founding Managing Editor of Quantum Information and Computation - the first journal dedicated specifically to this field. Its first issue appeared in July 2001.

Stephanie is Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor in quantum information. Her goal is to understand the world of small particles – the laws of quantum mechanics – in order to construct better networks and computers. Quantum bits behave quite differently than classical bits, and allow us to solve tasks that are provably impossible for any classical device. Stephanie’s research advances quantum information theory and its applications to both computer science and physics. She has worked extensively in quantum cryptography and communication, and one of her goals is to overcome the theoretical challenges in building large scale quantum networks. As part of the Quantum Internet Team at QuTech, she works with experimentalists in order to jointly realize this goal.

Stephanie is one the founders of QCRYPT, which has become the largest conference in quantum cryptography. She has written numerous scientific articles in both physics and computer science. From 2010 to 2014, her research group was located at the Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore, where she was first Assistant and later Associate Professor. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology in the group of John Preskill.

Professor Nicolas Gisin was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1952. He received his PhD degree in theoretical physics from the University of Geneva in 1981. After a post-doc at the University of Rochester, NY, and four years in industry, he joined the Group of Applied Physics at the University of Geneva where he has led the optics section since 1988. His activities range from the foundations of quantum physics to applications in quantum communications. He received two consecutive ERC Advanced Grants. In 2009 he was the first awardee of the John Steward Bell prize and in 2014 the Swiss Science prize delivered by the Marcel Benoist Foundation.