Title: Quantum time

Speaker: Lorenzo Maccone

Time: 2025-10-17 13:30

Venue: Room E100, Physics Building

Abstract: In textbook quantum mechanics, time is a (classical) parameter that is not described by the theory. Famously, there is no time observable, which means that there is no theoretical prescription of how to perform time measurements, much to the consternation of experimentalists who perform time measurements routinely. We describe a (slight) extension of quantum mechanics where time is treated as any other observable, we explore the implications, and briefly touch on the (ongoing) effort to extend this construction to a relativistic setting.

Bio:Prof.Lorenzo Maccone obtained a PhD in theoretical physics in 1999 from Pavia University. He has been Post-doctoral associate at the university of Pavia and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Research Associate at the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) in Torino (Italy), a visiting scientist at the Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an official faculty guest at the Los Alamos National Laboratories, and a contract professor at the University of Pavia. He is currently an Associate Professor at this last institution, where he teaches the undergraduate courses of Quantum Optics and of Electrodynamics, and the graduate course on Open Quantum Systems. His research interests span from the study of fundamental aspects to practical applications of Quantum Mechanics. His research activity has been chiefly devoted to quantum optics, quantum theory of measurement, quantum information and communication theory, and foundations of quantum mechanics.