PhD Scholarship in Physics: Quantum Many-Body Dynamics and Process Tensors

Who it is for

• Fully funded PhD scholarship for 3.5 years to support a UK or international student.
• The emergence of irreversible macroscopic behaviour from reversible microscopic laws is one of the most fascinating paradoxes of statistical physics.
• Understanding how this occurs in interacting systems is very difficult because of the exponential complexity of generic quantum many-body states.
• Tensor network methods are a powerful theoretical tool to represent and simulate these complex quantum states, yet they struggle to describe chaotic quantum dynamics at long times..
• Recently, new approaches to quantum dynamics have been developed, which are based on the quantum process tensor: a quantum state that represents multiple points in time, rather than in space.
• The process tensor is a powerful conceptual and theoretical tool with applications ranging from open quantum systems and condensed-matter physics to quantum gravity.
• However, despite recent progress, many open questions remain about the applications of process tensors in quantum many-body physics, their information-theoretic properties, and methods to numerically construct and manipulate them..
• The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the process tensors generated by interacting quantum many-body dynamics.
• What is the typical structure of classical and quantum temporal correlations?
• When and how can process tensors be efficiently constructed?
• How are their properties reflected in nonequilibrium phenomena such as energy transport, dynamical phase transitions, and information scrambling?
• Answering these questions could lead to deep insights into irreversibility, quantum chaos, and the emergence of the classical world, as well powerful new classical or quantum algorithms..
• At the start of the project,

Good to know

Stipend : stipend of approximately £22,000 p.a. with possible inflationary increases after the first year.. Tuition fees : Funding is available for 3.5 years and covers tuition fees at the level set for UK/EU students. This position is open to applicants of all nationalities.. Exact official public KCL record revalidated 2026-09-11, unsupported precision omitted.