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LOCATION:ICFO Auditorium and Online (Teams)
SUMMARY:ICFO | MATTEO SCANDI
CLASS:PUBLIC
DESCRIPTION:The modern understanding of physics is deeply linked with the c
 oncept of information. The revival of the study of quantum mechanics in th
 e form of quantum information is just an example of a more general trend s
 howing how the incorporation of ideas from information theory into the pra
 ctice of physics is not simply a fertile opportunity to find new results\,
  but it also offers a radically new understanding of what physics should b
 e describing: emblematic of this paradigm shift is the transition from the
  infinite dimensional space associated to the wave functions appearing in 
 the Schr&ouml\;dinger equation\, to the extreme simplicity of the modern c
 ornerstone of quantum mechanics\, the qubit. A special place in this conte
 xt is taken by thermodynamics: on the one hand\, because it was one of the
  first branches of physics in which the role of information was explicitly
  recognised\; on the other\, as the formal correspondence between Shannon 
 and Boltzmann entropy hints at a deep connection between the two. Ultimate
 ly\, it almost feels like these two theories will end up coinciding\, and 
 one will speak about thermodynamics just as information theory with erasur
 e. We are still far away from this claim\, but the continuous appearance o
 f information quantifiers in genuinely thermodynamics setting\, especially
  when characterising the dissipation\, cannot but corroborate this belief.
 \nThe aim of this thesis is to move further in the identification of the t
 wo theories\, by focusing on some aspects of information geometry and show
 ing how these naturally apply to the study of thermodynamic transformation
 s. In particular\, the main object of interest is the family of quantum Fi
 sher information metrics\, thoroughly studied in the first part of the the
 sis. In there we prove a fact that motivates the interest in this quantity
 : despite the statistical setting in which it was originally formulated\, 
 it has such a deep dynamical nature that all physical evolutions can actua
 lly be defined just in terms of their behaviour with respect to the Fisher
  information. In the second part of the thesis\, we connect this discussio
 n to the field of thermodynamics. In this context\, we show that the Fishe
 r information metrics naturally emerge in the description of the dissipati
 on in near-isothermal transformations\, that is whenever the driving is sl
 ow enough for the system to be close to equilibrium during the whole proto
 col. This shows another example of what seems to be a general rule: the na
 turality with which structures developed in the context of statistical inf
 erence and information theory apply to the study of entropy production.\nT
 hesis Director: Prof Dr. Antonio Ac&iacute\;n
DTSTAMP:20260405T123535Z
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