06/12/2024 Pierre Roux @UniMi

Wednesday, December 6, 2024 - 14:00

Aula Dottorato,
Dipartimento di Matematica,
Università degli Studi di Milano,
Via Cesare Saldini 50.

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SPEAKER: Pierre Roux (Institut Camille Jordan, École Centrale de Lyon)

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Disentangling pulse-coupled oscillators in the mean-field regime through the pseudo-inverse in a dilated timescale

Systems of pulse-coupled oscillators model synchronization through singular interactions occurring at discrete times, when particles reach a specific firing phase. They have numerous applications in physics, biology and engineering, for example to cardiac cells, neurons and fireflies. In the mean-field limit, the probability density in phase satisfies a singular continuity equation prone to finite-time blow-up, for which very few theoretical results are available. With José A. Carrillo, Xu’an Dou and Zhennan Zhou, we have introduced a reformulation of the mean-field system based on the inverse distribution function seen in a dilated timescale. It allows to show a hidden contraction/expansion mechanism and to propose simple and rigorous proofs of the long-time behaviour, the existence of steady states, the rates of convergence and the occurence of finite time blow-up for a large class of monotone phase response functions.

27/11/2024 : Mathematical and Philosophical Foundations of Open Systems @PoliMi

Wednesday, November 27, 2024 - 9:00 - 12:30

Sala Consiglio (7th floor), D-Mat
Mathematics Department of PoliMi
Campus Leonardo, bd.14 "Nave".

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Program:

9:00 Karim Thebault (Bristol): “The Universe as an Open Quantum System”

9:45 Mike Cuffaro (Munich): “The Open Systems View (and Algebraic Quantum Field Theory)”

Coffee break

11:00 Sebastien Rivat (Munich): “The Open Systems View in Field Theory”

11:45 Michele Correggi (PoliMi): Quasi-classical Limit of a Spin Coupled to a Reservoir

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Description

The existence of open systems in physics poses outstanding philosophical issues. Indeed, while closed systems can be studied in isolation from the rest of the universe, open systems interact with the environment by exchanging heat and work, information, or matter. As such, open systems are subjected to changes due to uncontrollable external influences, which makes it challenging to precisely determine their properties. Since typical systems in the physical universe are not isolated, providing an adequate description of open systems lies at the heart of contemporary physics. In quantum theory, this issue is further complicated by the presence of entanglement between distant systems. Even more puzzling, at a cosmological scale, it is still a controversial matter whether the whole universe should be considered a closed or open system. The present workshop brings together philosophers and mathematical physicists to discuss the foundations of open systems both from a formal and a conceptual point of view. The invited speakers are Mike Cuffaro (Munich), Michele Correggi (PoliMi), Karim Thebault (Bristol) and Sebastien Rivat (Munich).

Organizing Committee: Antoine Brandelet, Massimo Moscolari and Giovanni Valente – Department of Mathematics, Politecnico di Milano

Participation is free of charge.

Funding: The conference is funded by Line 3 of the “Dipartimento di Eccellenza 2023-2027” on Mathematical features of quantum mechanics (Principal Investigator: Prof. Correggi), and by the Italian Ministry of University and Research within the PRIN 2022 project Analogical Reasoning in Contemporary Physical Theories (ID: 2022F4Z8YH, Principal Investigator: Giovanni Valente).

30/10/2024 : Clotilde Fermanian Kammerer @PoliMi

Wednesday, October 30, 2024 - 14:00

Sala Consiglio (7th floor), D-Mat
Mathematics Department of PoliMi
Campus Leonardo, bd.14 "Nave".

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SPEAKER: Clotilde Fermanian Kammerer (Université d’Angers)

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Semi-classical measures, two scale semi-classical measures and applications

In this lecture, we will present semi-classical measures and show how they  describe the obstructions to strong convergence of bounded families of square integrable functions. We will also describe applications for families of solutions to PDEs, in particular to wave equations.


This initiative is part of the “PhD Lectures” activity of the project “Departments of Excellence 2023-2027” of the Department of Mathematics of    Politecnico di Milano. This activity consists of seminars open to PhD students, followed by meetings with the speaker to discuss and go into detail on the topics presented at the talk.

9 &10/10/2024 : Ludovico Lami @PoliMi

Wednesday, October 9, 2024 - 15:00
Thursday, October 10, 2024 - 11:30

Sala Consiglio (7th floor), D-Mat
Mathematics Department of PoliMi
Campus Leonardo, bd.14 "Nave".

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SPEAKER: Ludovico Lami (University of Amsterdam)

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A quantitative approach to entanglement theory via hypothesis testing (Oct. 9)

I will start by presenting the notion of entanglement as studied in quantum information theory. According to this definition, originally proposed by Werner in 1989, a density operator on a bipartite quantum system is declared to be entangled if it cannot be written as a convex combination of tensor products of single-system density operators, and separable (or unentangled) otherwise. I will then discuss the basics of quantum hypothesis testing and introduce the task of “entanglement testing”, which consists in discriminating a given entangled state from the set of all separable states. This task is a fundamental quantum information primitive, with applications ranging from device certification to gravitational entanglement detection. I will finish by discussing the statement of the “generalised quantum Stein’s lemma”, which connects the ultimate efficiency of entanglement testing with a key entanglement measure known as “relative entropy of entanglement”.

A solution of the generalised quantum Stein’s lemma (Oct. 10)


I will discuss the solution of the generalised quantum Stein’s lemma presented in [Lami, arXiv:2408.06410] (see also [Hayashi/Yamasaki, arXiv:2408.02722] forrelated work), which establishes that the Stein exponent associated with entanglement testing, namely, the quantum hypothesis testing task of distinguishing between n copies of an entangled state and a generic separable state, equals the regularised relative entropy of entanglement. To solve the problem I will briefly introduce two techniques. The first is a procedure called “blurring”, which, informally, transforms a permutationally symmetric state by making it more evenly spread across nearby type classes. I will discuss this technique extensively in the classical case, where it already suffices to prove the generalised Stein’s lemma. Depending on time, I will then present a second technical innovation, which is needed to prove the quantum version of the statement. This consists in a second quantisation step, which lifts the problem from a finite-dimensional system to an infinite-dimensionalbosonic quantum system, where it can then be solved with techniques from continuous-variable quantum information. Rather remarkably, the second-quantised action of the blurring map corresponds to a pure loss channel.


This initiative is part of the “PhD Lectures” activity of the project “Departments of Excellence 2023-2027” of the Department of Mathematics of Politecnico di Milano. This activity consists of seminars open to PhD students, followed by meetings with the speaker to discuss and go into detail on the topics presented at the talk.

30-31 May 2024: Andrea Posilicano @ Polimi

Thursday, May 30, 2024 and Friday, May 31, 2024 - 10:00
Sala Consiglio VII Piano, D-Mat
Politecnico di Milano
Ed. 14 "Nave", Campus Leonardo


SPEAKER: Andrea Posilicano (Università dell’Insubria)


Self-adjoint extensions by a Krein-type resolvent formula

We present a simple recipe to build all the self-adjoint extensions of a symmetric operator S which is the restriction of a given self-adjoint one. This provides the resolvent of the extensions and requires knowledge of neither the defect spaces nor the adjoint of S. Some applications to quantum mechanical models are given.

This initiative is part of the “PhD Lectures” activity of the project “Departments of Excellence 2023-2027” of the Department of Mathematics of Politecnico di Milano. This activity consists of seminars open to PhD students, followed by meetings with the speaker to discuss and go into detail on the topics presented at the talk.

05/06/2024 : Umberto Morellini @UniMi

Wednesday, June 5, 2024 - 11:15
Sala di Rappresentanza
Dipartimento di Matematica
Università degli Studi di Milano
Via Cesare Saldini 50

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SPEAKER: Umberto Morellini (Université Paris Dauphine, CEREMADE, PSL) ________________________________________________________________________

The free energy of Dirac’s vacuum in purely magnetic fields

The Dirac vacuum is a non-linear polarisable medium rather than an empty space. This non-linear behaviour starts to be significant for extremely large electromagnetic fields such as the magnetic field on the surface of certain neutron stars. Even though the null temperature case was deeply studied in the past decades, the problem at non-zero temperature needs to be better understood.
In this talk, we will present the first rigorous derivation of the one-loop effective magnetic Lagrangian at positive temperature, a non-linear functional describing the free energy of quantum vacuum in a classical magnetic field. After introducing our model, we will properly define the free energy functional using the Pauli-Villars regularisation technique in order to remove the worst ultraviolet divergences, which represent a well known issue of the theory. The study of the properties of this functional will be addressed before focusing on the limit of slowly varying classical magnetic fields. In this regime, one can prove the convergence of this functional to the Euler-Heisenberg
formula with thermal corrections, recovering the effective Lagrangian first derived by Dittrich in 1979. The talk is based on the work available at arXiv:2404.12733.

20-22-24 May 2024: Hynek Kovarik @ Polimi

Monday, May 20, 2024 - 10:00 , Wednesday, May 22, 2024 - 11:00, Friday, May 24, 2024 - 10:00
Sala Consiglio VII Piano, D-Mat
Politecnico di Milano
Ed. 14 "Nave", Campus Leonardo


SPEAKER: Hynek Kovarik (Università di Brescia)


Trace formulas for one-dimensional Schrödinger operators

One-dimensional Schroedinger operators satisfy certain identity, called the trace formula, which relates the scattering and spectral data of the operator in question with integral means of the corresponding potential. In this mini-course we will give a sketch of the proof of this formula and discuss some of its applications.

This initiative is part of the “PhD Lectures” activity of the project “Departments of Excellence 2023-2027” of the Department of Mathematics of Politecnico di Milano. This activity consists of seminars open to PhD students, followed by meetings with the speaker to discuss and go into detail on the topics presented at the talk.

7-8 May 2024: Horia Cornean @ Polimi

Tuesday, May 7, 2024 - 10:15 , Wednesday, May 8, 2024 - 11:00
Aula Seminari III Piano, D-Mat
Politecnico di Milano
Ed. 14 "Nave", Campus Leonardo


SPEAKER: Horia Cornean (Aalborg Universitet)


On the Landauer-Büttiker formalism

In the first part we will introduce the setting and prove some fundamental scattering results related to the existence and completeness of wave operators arising in mesoscopic systems, and also prove the “classical” Landauer-Büttiker formula for non-interacting systems. The second part will be about providing sufficient conditions such that the time evolution of a mesoscopic tight-binding open system with a local Hartree-Fock non-linearity converges to a self-consistent non-equilibrium steady state, which is independent of the initial condition from the “small sample”. We will also show that the steady charge current intensities are given by Landauer-Büttiker-like formulas, and make the connection with the case of weakly self-interacting many-body systems. In order to get a better idea of what the lectures will cover, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01564 .

This initiative is part of the “PhD Lectures” activity of the project “Departments of Excellence 2023-2027” of the Department of Mathematics of Politecnico di Milano. This activity consists of seminars open to PhD students, followed by meetings with the speaker to discuss and go into detail on the topics presented at the talk.

07/05/2024: Cornelia Vogel @ UniMi

Tuesday, May 7, 2024 - 11:30
Sala di rappresentanza
Dipartimento di Matematica
Università degli Studi di Milano
Via Cesare Saldini 50

SPEAKER: Cornelia Vogel (Universität Tübingen)


Concentration of measure for thermal distributions of quantum states

We generalize Lévy’s Lemma, a concentration-of-measure result for the uniform probability distribution on high-dimensional spheres, to a more general class of measures, so-called GAP measures. For any given density matrix ρ on a separable Hilbert space H, GAP(ρ) is the most spread out probability measure on the unit sphere of H that has density matrix ρ and thus forms the natural generalization of the uniform distribution. We prove concentration-of-measure whenever the largest eigenvalue ||ρ|| of ρ is small. With the help of this result we generalize the well-known and important phenomenon of ”canonical typicality” to GAP measures. Canonical typicality is the statement that for ”most” pure states ψ of a given ensemble, the reduced density matrix of a sufficiently small subsystem is very close to a ψ-independent matrix. So far, canonical typicality is known for the uniform distribution on finite-dimensional spheres, corresponding to the micro-canonical ensemble. Our result shows that canonical typicality holds in general for systems described by a density matrix with small eigenvalues. Since certain GAP measures are quantum analogs of the canonical ensemble of classical mechanics, our results can also be regarded as a version of equivalence of ensembles. The talk is based on joint work with Stefan Teufel and Roderich Tumulka.

22/04/2024: Antoine Prouff @UniMi

Monday, April 22, 2024 - 11:15
Sala di Rappresentanza
Dipartimento di Matematica
Università degli Studi di Milano
Via Cesare Saldini 50

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SPEAKER: Antoine Prouff (Université Paris-Saclay, Laboratoire de Mathématique d’Orsay) _________________________________________________________________________

Egorov’s theorem in the Weyl-Hörmander calculus and application to the control of PDEs

It is known that geometric optics can be derived as the high-frequency limit of the wave equation, from both experimental and theoretical perspectives. This fact can be regarded as an instance of a “quantum-classical correspondence principle”, made rigorous by Egorov’s theorem, which relates the evolution of a linear PDE (e.g. the wave equation) to the natural underlying classical dynamics (e.g. the geodesic flow).

We will present a version of Egorov’s theorem in the Euclidean space, in the setting of the “Weyl-Hörmander calculus”. This general framework of microlocal analysis involves Riemannian metrics on the phase space adapted to the dynamics under consideration, and allows for a fairly large range of applications (study of Schrödinger, wave and transport equations).

If time allows, we will discuss in more detail an application to the observability of the Schrödinger equation with a confining potential in the Euclidean space.