History

The first Solvay conference was held in 1911, and happens every 3 years. Since its begginng the conference and its participants provided an overview on the current state of affairs in physics and chemistry around the globe. This conference was there from the beging of quantum era and is still kept alive by scientist. Solvay conference is one of the most notable conferences, with the 5th one in 1927 being the most famous. This is the event where the legendary photo at the start of the post has been taken. This photo is originally black and white but has been updated with color. On it we recognize the giants and mothers/fathers of modern day physics.

My Perspective

This year the Solvay conference was held on the topic of quantum information. A topic quite close to my personal interests. I’m somewhat surprised that I actually work in this field.

Back in 2014 I went to a summer school organized in Ireland. Small village at the coast, was home to a large number of scientiest involved in quantum information theory and integrable systems. After the conference I was convinced I will not work in this field. However, as destiny would have it, 8 years after this is exactly where I find myself. My scientific fields of interest have always been statistical mechanics and low-dimensional quantum systems. Turns out these fields are intimately related to quantum information theory. My perspective has changed over the years and quantum information theory is not just Nielse and Chung book. Now the concepts of entanglement and quantum complexity are intimately related to the concepts from this famous textbook.

Content of the Conference

This weekend I finished reading John Preskill’s overview article on the contents of the Solvay 2022 conference. You can find the article HERE!

This article gives a birds-eye view on the current state of affairs in quantum information theory and is an extremely valuable resource for anyone wanting to keep-up with the field. If you are looking to learn about

1. quantum computer science
2. quantum hardware
3. quantum matter
4. quantum gravity

this is good starting point for its modern day perspective. This text also includes detailed hardware realization of qubits and their current noise successability.

My Perspective on the Contents

Personally, I’m currenly learning about quantum complexity and its relationship to quantum gravity. It is remarkable that the concepts like entanglement are playing such a fundamental role in the studies of black holes. Entanglement is a unique property of quantum mechanics that I have been studing in recent years. Hopefully, the work I’m engaged in will contribute to this modern day perspective on quantum mechanics and complexity theory.

Additionally, quantum matter and the phenomenology of topologically ordered phases has also been a key interest of mine in the last month. Via the work of Wen, I have become familiar with these exotic phases of matter that have their defining property in long-range entanglement. My perspective on topological states has been in a way classical so far, and I was not aware how much of the topological phenomelogy is indeed connected to the entaglement properties. However, these states of matter are hard to study and with the advent of quantum simulator we are going to be able to design and mimic the theoretical proposals that have been here for decades.

From my point of view, quantum simulators are going to be technology that will move the physics forward. New understanding of fundamental physics is going to come from these devices rather than fault toleran quantum computers that are years and years away from realization. The recent literature seems to verify this expectation and trend.

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Below you can find the embedded link to the twitter post of John Preskill, detailing the names of the Solvay conference participants in its modern day incarnation.

Group photo for the 28th Solvay Conference on Physics: The Physics of Quantum Information. pic.twitter.com/2wa0xfOG2F

— John Preskill (@preskill) May 24, 2022