Seminari del Dipartimento di Matematica

Seminario del 2025

Why is our world classical despite being governed by quantum mechanics?

nel ciclo di seminari: SEMINARS IN MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS AND BEYOND

analisi matematica

fisica matematica

This question has been much discussed in physics and one suggestion is that the long time persistence of classical/quantum correspondence is due to interaction of a small, observed system with a larger environment. Lindblad or GKSL evolution is one of the standard models for describing such interactions. In that context the question of the length of time of classical/quantum agreement was recently revisited in physics by Hernández-Ranard-Riedel. In my talk I will introduce the concept of Lindblad evolution and present results showing that the evolution of a quantum observable remains close to the classical Fokker-Planck evolution in the Hilbert-Schmidt norm for times vastly exceeding the Ehrenfest time (the limit of such an agreement when there is no interaction with a larger system). The time scale is the same as in two recent papers by Hernández-Ranard-Riedel but the statement and methods are different. The talk is based on joint work with J Galkowski and numerical results obtained jointly with Z Huang. I will also comment on recent progress on trace class estimates by Z Li and on the hypoelliptic case by H Smith.