The so-called "World Quantum Day" is this weekend. It is on the 14th of April, for a very, very, very, VERY silly set of reasons. (It should clearly be on the 1st of May, as ℏ~1.05 in SI units)

If you want to know more, I actually wrote a "popular science" outline of the work on my personal website. (First time posting there in a long time!) It's just such a fascinating question to think about: tomrivlin.com/2024/06/a-new-…

Join us! Join us! Join us!

In 2021 I made a SciShow video about 'weird unsolved mysteries of math', including the 'moving sofa' problem. youtube.com/watch?v=3b6zvc… Now there's an update: someone claims to have solved the problem and found the largest possible moving sofa! arxiv.org/abs/2411.19826

A good reminder for everyone to watch the very good Pokémon Concierge miniseries on Netflix

Nice article about the history of the idea of entropy over the last 200 years. I'll have more to say about this in the new year 👀

I feel quite proud of this: I'm officially qualified to speak German at the B2 level. Just one year ago I passed a B1 part 1 exam, so pretty quick progress!

Happy new year, everyone! We had a few preprints out over the χ-mas break, so let's talk about them. 1: Here Simon looks at optimal strategies for estimating phase rotations in homodyne detections with Gaussian probe states + prior knowledge arxiv.org/abs/2412.16023

It was quite a challenge to count all the preprints put out in 2024 by our research area, the Atominstitut theory division. QuITters never quit!

Novel bounds on the equilibration of observables in isolated quantum systems help resolve the apparent contradiction between the second law of thermodynamics and unitary evolution. @quitphysics TU Wien @MathsMire Tom Rivlin Jake Xuereb Marcus Huber go.aps.org/3CkRsjk

This is now out in the journal Physical Review X Quantum! Super excited to be able to share this piece of work with everyone. I'm incredibly proud of it journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abs…

New SciShow! Before modern rocketry, Jules Verne imagined using a giant cannon to get to space, and in the 1960s, a guy who was practically a real-life Bond villain almost made that dream a reality. Find out about all that and more here! youtube.com/watch?v=guPx59…

Mainly posting in The Other Place now by the way (and posting less in general tbh). I just worked out how to get the DNS settings in my personal site working so I have a custom domain there, too! Check out bsky.app/profile/tomriv…

This paper from our group has now been given a lovely write-up on the Atominstitut's website by Florian Aigner from TU Wien (with contributions from the authors of the paper) Check it out in English: tuwien.at/en/phy/ati/new… ...or in German: tuwien.at/phy/ati/news/a…

I contributed to this lovely article about the new PRX Quantum paper I was involved in! Check it out to learn more about how the second law of thermodynamics behaves differently in quantum theory

New SciShow! It's a topic close to my own work in quantum thermo. You may know that absolute zero is the lowest possible temperature... But controversially, some claim that temperatures lower than zero are possible in some cases. Here's how it works: youtu.be/KHVEwTMA19M?si…

To us, every year is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, but it's nice that it's official now... And this week, Marcus spoke to esteemed science journo Emily Conover about the future of quantum theory, with some hot takes 👀 sciencenews.org/article/quantu…