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SYEC: Symposium Entanglement and Complexity – How “Complex” is Nature?

SYEC 1: Entanglement and Complexity – How “Complex” is Nature?

SYEC 1.4: Invited Talk

Thursday, September 11, 2025, 12:15–12:45, ZHG010

There's a hole in my quantum bucket -- complexified quantum theory and its classical limit — •Eva-Maria Graefe — Imperial College London

Traditional quantum mechanics focusses on the description of systems that are closed or well-separated from their environment. Take for example the interior of a bucket. If the bucket is in a good condition its contents will remain inside. However, many physical systems exhibit leakage, such as a loss of a leaking buckets contents to the environment. In quantum mechanics the interior of such an open system can effectively be described by non-Hermitian quantum mechanics, where complex-valued energies encode life-times of states. In this talk, I will provide an overview of non-Hermitian quantum theory, focusing on the aspect of quantum-classical correspondence.

Keywords: non-Hermitian quantum mechanics; quantum-classical correspondence; open quantum systems