About QUINST

Quantum mechanics is at the heart of our technology and economy - the laser and the transistor are quantum devices - but its full potential is far from being realized. Recent technological advances in optics, nanoscience and engineering allow experimentalists to create artificial structures or put microscopic and mesoscopic systems under new manipulable conditions in which quantum phenomena play a fundamental role.

Quantum technologies exploit these effects with practical purposes. The objective of Quantum Science is to discover, study, and control quantum efects at a fundamental level. These are two sides of a virtuous circle: new technologies lead to the discovery and study of new phenomena that will lead to new technologies.

Our aim is  to control and understand quantum phenomena in a multidisciplinary intersection of  Quantum Information, Quantum optics and cold atoms, Quantum Control, Spintronics, Quantum metrology, Atom interferometry, Superconducting qubits and Circuit QED and Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.

QUINST is funded in part as a “Grupo Consolidado” from the Basque Government (IT472-10, IT986-16, IT1470-22)  and functions as a network of groups with their own funding, structure, and specific goals.  

Latest events

Thomas Vojta (Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, United States)

When and where

From: 11/2010 To: 11/2016

Description

2009/07/14, Thomas Vojta (Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, United States)

Place: Sala de Seminarios del Departamento de Física Teórica e Historia de la Ciencia
Time: 10h.
Title: Phase transitions and disorder: Harris criterion, Griffiths singularities, and smearing
Abstract
Phase transitions are fascinating phenomena in nature with
consequences ranging from the large scale structure of the
universe to exotic quantum phases at low temperatures. Many
realistic systems contain impurities, defects and other forms
of quenched disorder. This talk explores the consequences
of such randomness on the properties of phase transitions.
At zero-temperature quantum phase transitions, randomness
can have particularly peculiar and strong effects. Often, rare
strong disorder fluctuations and the rare spatial regions that
support them dominate the physics close to the transition.
They give rise to strong singularities in the free energy, the so-called quantum-Griffiths singularities, In some systems
such as metallic magnets, the effects of rare fluctuations
can be even stronger, leading to a destruction of the phase
transition by smearing. We suggest a classification of these
rare region effects based on the effective dimensionality of
the defects, and we illustrate it using examples from classical,
quantum, and nonequilibrium phase transitions.