Quantum Theorems and Quantum Heat

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Measurement is how we learn about properties of a system. There are many different definitions work ind heats that seem to be useful depending on how you poke the system. Physicists are stereotyped as being obsessed with udification, trying to take a whole bunch of different theories and show they're really the same theory. But maybe there doesn't need to be because there are diverse situations. And measurement strategies can be useful in different ations. So the measurement of or the disturbance of a quantum system by measurement is extremely fundamentally important in quantum thermo dynamics.

Randomness and probability are central to modern physics. In statistical mechanics this is because we don’t know everything about the distribution of atoms and molecules in a fluid, so we consider a probability distribution over what they might be; in quantum mechanics it’s because the theory only lets us predict measurement outcomes probabilistically. Physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern explains how we’ve been lagging behind at bringing these two theories together, and how recent progress is changing the landscape of how we think about the microworld.

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Nicole Yunger Halpern received her Ph.D. in physics from Caltech. She is currently a NIST physicist and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Physics and IPST at the University of Maryland. Her Ph.D. thesis won the international Ilya Prigogine Prize for a thermodynamics dissertation. As a postdoc she received the International Quantum Technology Emerging Researcher Award. Her new book is Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow.

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