Dear Colleagues,

We would like to invite you to the following SPASS https://sites.google.com/unipi.it/spass seminar, jointly organized by UniPi, SNS, UniFi and UniSi:

*Thermalization of 2D Quantum Memories* by Angelo Lucia (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

The seminar will take place in person on *THU, 01.12.2022 at 14:00* in Aula Seminari, Department of Mathematics, University of Pisa and streamed online here https://meet.google.com/gji-phwo-vbg.

The organizers, A. Agazzi, G. Bet, A. Caraceni, F. Grotto, G. Zanco https://sites.google.com/unipi.it/spass

--------------------------------------------

*Title: Thermalization of 2D Quantum Memories*

*Abstract: **The aim of a quantum memory is to protect an encoded quantum state against errors for long periods of time. Quantum double models are a class of 2D quantum memories proposed by Kitaev, in which the protection from noise is due to the topological properties of the ground state degeneracy.*

*Heuristic arguments have long pointed to a weakness of these models against thermal noise processes. In this talk I will present a rigorous estimate on the lifetime of these memories under a noise process modeled by Davies generators which confirms these findings. This estimate is obtained by proving that the spectral gap of the generator is lower bounded by a positive constant uniformly in the system size.*