PhD Colloquium: Fabio Maltoni (Université catholique de Louvain & Università di Bologna)

Quantum Mechanics (QM), one of the most counter-intuitive and vanguard  descriptions of fundamental phenomena ever conceived, is not only at the heart of our understanding of the Universe, of matter, and of its interactions, but has also gained a primary role in science and technology with a large range of applications to our everyday life going from computing, to information theory, to safe communications. While we currently have no motivation to think that QM would stop to describe phenomena at short distances, at least below the Planck scale, it is interesting to ponder to what extent fundamental quantum effects can be probed beyond the atomic scales (10−10 m). Such a question has recently gained further momentum after the observation of entanglement in the spin of top/anti-top quark pairs at the LHC, the highest energy accelerator experiment on earth, operating at the TeV (10−19 m, 10−28 s) scale. This seminar will review the main ideas and results of applying quantum information concepts and methods to the study of fundamental interactions and illustrate the perspectives.