Renato Renner (ETH, Zurich) will give a colloquium on Wednesday 30 April at 19:30 in room CM 1.26, the Gorlaeus New Building. The Dinner will start as usual at 18:00 hours and will be held in the Beta Café, 1st floor GB.

The colloquium is titled ‘Insights from Quantum Foundations into Black Holes’.

More info can be found here.

Abstract

Black holes provide a testing ground for the interplay between General Relativity and quantum theory, as seen in phenomena like Hawking radiation. Yet this interplay gives rise to deep puzzles — famously, the “firewall paradox”, in which the predictions made by an infalling observer and an outside observer, when combined, lead to a contradiction.

In this talk, I will argue that recent advances in quantum foundations suggest an unexpected resolution: the paradox may not reflect a clash between General Relativity and quantum theory but instead point to quantum theory’s limitations in consistently describing scenarios involving multiple observers with different perspectives.

 

 

The kick-off meeting of the Summit Quantum Limits project takes place on Wednesday 16 April. All PI’s, PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers from QuTech, QN and LION are welcome to attend. Registration link can be found in the invite.

This one-day event will feature a set of brief, visionary scientific talks covering the four fundamental research pillars of the project: mass, complexity, time, and space. Additionally, the PI’s who will receive funding through the first internal call for Quantum Limits projects will present their proposed research. To foster engagement and collaboration, we highly encourage active participation throughout the day, including in the “Connection Carousel” networking activity.

Date and time: 16 April 2025, 9.00–17.30h
Location: Lijm & Cultuur, Rotterdamseweg 272, 2628 AT Delft.

 

Results of the 1st Internal Open Call of the Quantum Limits project

Within the 1st Internal Open Call of the Quantum Limits project, the management committee has awarded funding to 15 teams of researchers from the Leiden Institute of Physics (LION) and from the Quantum Nanoscience Department (QN) and QuTech at Delft University of Technology.

This funding will enable the selected teams to appoint a PhD candidate or a postdoctoral researcher to further develop their research ideas in alignment with the goals of the NWO Summit grant on Quantum Limits. The 15 awarded projects are distributed across the four research lines of the project and will be presented during the kick-off meeting on 16 April 2025.

Below is an overview of the funded projects and PI’s:

Title	Principal Investigators
Quantum Chips with No Limits: Remote Entanglement in Heterogeneous Quantum Networks	Christian Andersen (QuTech) and Anasua Chatterjee (QuTech)
What is the quantum limit of friction?	Semonti Bhattacharyya (LION) and Mazhar N. Ali (QN)
Strongly-interacting quantum matter beyond 2 dimensions	Stefano Bosco (QuTech) and Menno Veldhorst (QuTech)
Quantum Information Processing in the Brain	Dirk Bouwmeester (LION) and Evert van Nieuwenburg (LION)
Understanding the trainability limits of classical neural-network representations of quantum states	Anna Dawid (LION) and Hao Wang (LION)
Domain Wall Qubits	Leo Kouwenhoven (QuTech) and Toeno van der Sar (QN)
xqLIMITS: Expanding the Limits of Quantum Complexity with Automated Reasoning	Alfons Laarman (Applied Quantum Algorithms, Leiden University) and Sebastian Feld (QuTech)
Quantum kicks – from decoherence to driving superpositions	Wolfgang Löffler (LION) and Sense Jan van der Molen (LION)
Massive Quantum Chaos – does complexity speed up gravitational non-unitarity of a quantum system?	Tjerk Oosterkamp (LION) and Louk Rademaker (Lorentz Institute / University of Geneva)
Pushing the Quantum Frontier with Electron-Driven Quantum Control of Levitated Nanoparticles	Massimiliano Rossi (QN) and Sonia Conesa Boj (QN)
Is there a fundamental quantum limit on diffusion?	Koenraad Schalm (LION) and Kaveh Lahabi (LION)
Ultrahigh-Q Mechanical Vacuum Gap Capacitors to Explore the Limits of Mass and Quantum Mechanics	Gary Steele (QN) and Richard Norte (TUD Department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering)
Finding the limits of quantum time crystals	Tim Taminiau (QuTech) and Ryoichi Ishihara (QuTech)
PACMAN Preparation And Certification of highly-entangled Multipartite quANtum states	Jordi Tura (LION) and Tim Coopmans (QuTech)
Entanglement scaling and quantum phases in a superconducting quantum dot chain	Michael Wimmer (QuTech) and Natalia Chepiga (QN)

 

1st Open Call for Quantum Limits projects

Principal Investigators of the partners UL/LION, TUD/AS/QN and QuTech are invited to submit project proposals for Quantum Limits. The Quantum Limits Open Call aims to support research by PhD candidates and Postdocs who will be working on projects towards the goals of the Quantum Limits grant and who will be co-supervised by at least two PIs.

The submission deadline for this first call is January 31st, 2025.

Further information can be found here. (PDF)