PhD Scholarship in Physics: Quantum Many-Body Dynamics and Process Tensors

Fully funded PhD scholarship for 3.5 years to support a UK or international student. The emergence of irreversible macroscopic behaviour from reversible microscopic laws is one of the most fascinating paradoxes of statistical physics. Understanding how this occurs in interacting systems is very difficult because of the exponential complexity of generic quantum many-body states. The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the process tensors generated by interacting quantum many-body dynamics. This project will explore questions about the typical structure of classical and quantum temporal correlations, how process tensors can be efficiently constructed, and how their properties are reflected in nonequilibrium phenomena such as energy transport, dynamical phase transitions, and information scrambling. At the start of the project, students will explore the spatio-temporal structure of quantum information in simple, analytically tractable models of chaotic and integrable quantum processes. Students will have significant freedom to shape the project's direction, depending on their skills and interests. Future work could involve deriving analytical bounds on quantum and classical temporal correlations, developing new tensor-network simulation methods, or devising experimental proposals to detect irreversibility in quantum processes. This project will be conducted in collaboration with other members of the Theory of Controlled Quantum Systems (ToCQS) group in the Department of Physics at King's College London.