Speaker
Jason Pollack
Description
Quantum information theorists, many-body physicists, and cosmologists often have very different intuitions about open systems. In particular, the first group usually consider all possible quantum physical evolutions compatible with unitarity, while the latter groups usually prefer to derive open-system behavior by integrating out a specific, often infinite, environment sector. I'll give a couple of examples in which the latter groups can benefit by passing to simpler "environment-agnostic" descriptions, and then finish by discussing how the quantum information treatment of Markovianity can be drastically simplified by making physical assumptions about the environment.