2025.10.14. Gakuhen-B "Quantum Energy Innovation" Seminar Series (Seok Hyung Lie)

As part of our area’s seminar series, a seminar by Seok Hyung Lie will be held on Tuesday, October 14, 2025, at Kyushu University’s Ito Campus.

Details are as follows:

Speaker: Seok Hyung Lie (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology)
Date: Tuesday, October 14, 2025, 14:40–
Place: Room 826 (Conference Room 4), West Building 2, Ito Campus, Kyushu University

Title：Thermal operations from informational equilibrium
Abstract：
Thermal operations are quantum channels that have taken a prominent role in deriving fundamental thermodynamic limitations in quantum systems. In this talk, we show that these channels are uniquely characterized by a purely quantum information theoretic property: They admit a dilation into a unitary process that leaves the environment invariant when applied to the equilibrium state. In other words, they are the only channels that preserve equilibrium between system and environment. Extending this perspective, we explore an information theoretic idealization of heat bath behavior, by considering channels where the environment remains locally invariant for every initial state of the system. These are known as catalytic channels. We show that catalytic channels provide a refined hierarchy of Gibbs-preserving maps for fully-degenerate Hamiltonians, and are closely related to dual unitary quantum circuits.