Simone Warzel – Technical University of Munich
Wednesday, June 18th , 2025
Zoom opens: 10:30AM DST
Seminar begins: 10:45AM DST
Rapid thermalization of toric codes
Toric codes are prominent examples of quantum Hamiltonians that promise to encode quantum information in their ground states stably. In contact with a heat bath, the code’s quantum state will eventually converge to a Gibbs state. We investigate the mixing time of this process when described by a Davis quantum Markovian semigroup. We establish a bound on the mixing time in the high-temperature regime, which is logarithmic in the system's size, thereby placing this class of quantum models on par with classical results on Glauber dynamics. This is done by establishing a modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality.
In this talk, I will explain the models, the basic concepts, and the ideas behind the above result (joint work with Angela Capel, Cambyse Rouze and Sebastian Stengele).