A year to celebrate quantum physics

Toni Feder

Jonathan M. Robbins

This Viewpoint relates to an article by J H Hannay (1985 J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 18 221) and was published as part of a series of Viewpoints celebrating some of the most influential papers published in Journal of Physics A, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

L. Piccirillo

There is a story, not verified 1 , that Lord Kelvin has claimed, quite boldly around the year 1890, that all the physics was practically known and what was left to do was to refine the values of the measured fundamental constants. This statement was enunciated to celebrate the success of what we call today “classical mechanics” and it is nowhere to be found in any lectures or writings of Kelvin 2 .

Simon Milz, Felix A. Pollock, Kavan Kishore Modi

This special volume celebrates the 40th anniversary of the discovery of the Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad master equation, which is widely used in quantum physics and quantum chemistry. The present contribution aims to celebrate a related discovery — also by Sudarshan — that of Quantum Maps (which had their 55th anniversary in the same year). Nowadays, much like the master equation, quantum maps are ubiquitous in physics and chemistry. Their importance in quantum information and related fields cannot be overstated. Here, we motivate quantum maps from a tomographic perspective, and derive their well-known representations. We then dive into the murky world beyond these maps, where recent research has yielded their generalisation to non-Markovian quantum processes.

Nina Meinzer, Yanne K. Chembo, Joseph J Niemela