Quantum Foundations

Our description of reality depends heavily on the lens through which we observe it. While we perceive reality at large scales as objective and governed by the laws of classical mechanics and thermodynamics, as we zoom in to microscopic scales, we need quantum theory with its inherently probabilistic nature. How seemingly quantum systems – such as single atoms, or photons – tend to behave classically when scaled up in size, remains a fascinating and unresolved question. Conversely, it is intriguing to understand whether phenomena we experience only macroscopically, such as gravity, may have a quantum origin. The Qunipa team works at the interface between microscopic quantum processes and macroscopic classical phenomena to characterize the emergence of classical reality from underlying quantum structures: through (quantum) information theoretic tools, we study the way information evolves across the quantum-to-classical transition giving rise to scrambling and Darwinistic phenomenology in many-body quantum systems. We challenge our fundamental understanding of open quantum systems and their interaction with macroscopic (thermal or gravitational) environments sharpening our comprehension of quantum decoherence. While doing so, we always give a nod to the experiment, designing practical setups to investigate quantum decoherence and the possible quantum nature of gravity.