more about Dresden
Let me summarize my impressions from Dresden workshop that I’ve left on 17-6-2010. Its official name was "Quantum Information Concepts for Condensed Matter Problems". It was very timely to consolidate an emerging community of condensed matter theorists: unfortunately there was just a single experimental talk, very good one but yet not in condensed matter.
The organizers where:
Ian Affleck (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)
Masud Haque (MPIPKS Dresden, Germany)
Ulrich Schollwöck (LMU München, München, Germany)
A typical activity reported in the course of a workshop is to take a complicated many-boby wave function such as of Fractional Quantum Hall state, or Heisenberg chain, numerically compute entanglemet of a part of the system, and compare it with known theoretical predictions. Both making predictions and computing is challenging and difficult. The expectation is that the activity will let us understand more about the properties and internal structure of the complicated many-body states, and it looks like there is some progress here.
Another activity is connected to the words "quantum quench": perhaps the most buzzing word combination at the conference. In this case, the dynamics of entanglement is of interest. The value to predict/compute is the change of entanglement that takes place when two parts of the system are connected and disconnected. This is related to my attempts to study the transport of quantum information quantities.
