The scientific career of E. C. G. Sudarshan is reported, with some biographical notes to frame the results. His research and teaching achievements span more than fifty years, and he has been Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin since 1969, where he is still quite active and taking up students. Symmetry, in its multiple aspects, is perhaps the feature more persistent in his whole work; also the complex relations between classical and quantum realities permeates most of his mature- period papers.
The scientific career of E. C. G. Sudarshan is reported, with some biographical notes to frame the results. His research and teaching achievements span more than fifty years, and he has been Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin since 1969, where he is still quite active and taking up students. Symmetry, in its multiple aspects, is perhaps the feature more persistent in his whole work; also the complex relations between classical and quantum realities permeates most of his mature- period papers.
As is evident from the scope of this meeting, Sudarshan's scientific interests and contributions have covered a broad area of physics.Among them optics plays a very prominent role.I say optics rather than quantum optics, as is so fashionable these days, because many of Sudarshan's investigations have been particularly concerned with some striking analogies and some remarkable similarities which were found to exist between these two fields, particularly in the domain of optical coherence.In fact some of Sudarshan's contributions to this area have been largely responsible for the clarifications of several subtle questions, which in the 1960s -soon after the invention of the laser -were rather controversial.I take some pride in having been responsible -together with my colleague Leonard Mandel -for stimulating Sudarshan's interest in this field.
This book describes the many aspects of the life and scientific work of Erwin Schrödinger, who, perhaps more than anyone else, serves to represent the whole of modern physics. The contributions to the book are from many hands, and so it seemed useful to me to precede them with a short note giving an uncontroversial account of his life which will serve as a framework into which they can be fitted. Such a collection as this still leaves out many aspects of Schrödinger's thought, for it considers his philosophy only in passing, his poetry not at all and ignores his wide and deep interest in sculpture and painting and in the classics. Schrödinger was born in Vienna on August 12, 1887, and entered the University there to read physics in 1906. He worked there as an assistant from 1910 till his war service, and again after the war. Some short term appointments at Jena, Stuttgart and Breslau led up to his appointment to the chair of theoretical physics in Zürich in 1921. He was already treating a wide range of topics, but concentrating on atomic theory, for the old quantum theory had now entered on its heroic phase of final collapse. His six papers founding wave mechanics came at the end of his Zürich years, and in 1927 he went to the chair in Berlin, to remain there till the advent of Hitler in 1933.
The year 2026 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the two seminal papers in which Gorini, Kossakowski, and Sudarshan, and independently Lindblad, characterized the generators of completely positive quantum dynamical semigroups. We revisit the conceptual and historical route leading to the Gorini-Kossakowski-Lindblad-Sudarshan (GKLS) master equation and examine several of its early developments and consequences. Our aim is to show how several initially separate mathematical and physical ideas converged in the GKLS structure theorem, imme- diately opening the way to manifold consequences for the description of dissipative quantum phenomena and how that theorem, fifty years later, remains both a foundational result and an active framework for open quantum dynamics.
ECG Sudarshan passed away on Monday, May 16, 2018 at the age of 86 in Texas, USA. He was the most brilliant theoretical physicist of Indian origin of the century. His research spanned a wide range of topics like Particle Physics, Quantum Optics, Quantum Field Theory, Quantum Information Theory, Gauge Theories and Classical Mechanics and in each of them he could make unique contributions. He has been credited with numerous important inventions in the field of Theoretical Physics including Optical Coherence, Sudarshan-Glauber Representation, V-A Theory, Tachyons, Quantum Zeno Effect, Open Quantum System, Spin-statistics Theorem, Non-invariance Groups, Positive Maps of Density Matrices, Quantum Computation etc. His contributions include also on subjects like Orientalia, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. This is a brief account of his life and works in remembrance.
This volume represents the talks given at the Conference on Interactions between Representation Theory, Quantum Field Theory, Category Theory, Mathematical Physics, and Quantum Information Theory, held in September 2007 at the University of Texas at Tyler. The papers in this volume, written by top experts in the field, address physical aspects, mathematical aspects, and foundational issues of quantum computation. This volume will benefit researchers interested in advances in quantum computation and communication, as well as graduate students who wish to enter the field of quantum computation.
The sixty publications selected for this thesis cover a period of forty years, from my time as a PhD student in the Physics Department of the University of Tasmania up to the present in 2002 as founding Professor of Electronic Engineering and Applied Physics and Director of the Centre for Advanced Telecommunications and Quantum Electronics at the University of Canberra. Many of the papers have been co-authored with research students and associates whose valued contributions I have acknowledged below. Unless otherwise stated I have only included accounts of work in which I have played a leading part. I have divided the papers, in some cases somewhat arbitrarily, into two groups which reflect my interests over this period: (a) Aeronomy, Astrophysics and Astronomy, and (b) Fluctuations, Noise and Quantum Electronics. Within these two groups I have attempted a further subdivision in which I have selected and presented papers to illustrate the development of specific concepts and lines of approach, usually in chronological order. This has meant the inclusion of a number of abstracts, short papers and two patent descriptions. (a) AERONOMY, ASTROPHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY The publications in this section cover a period of twenty seven years, starting with my PhD studies at the University of Tasmania in 1960. They include work performed at the University of Adelaide, the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Otago and finally at the University of Canberra, prior to the commencement of my Work in the field of quantum electronics and quantum optics in 1989. (b) FLUCTUATIONS, NOISE AND QUANTUM ELECTRONICS The papers in this section have a common theme: the analysis of physical systems and processes in which random and chaotic fluctuations play an important part.