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Florian Meier

@flowrian.ch
477 followers 147 following 43 posts

Foundational questions: Raclette or Fondue? 🧀🇨🇭 What is time without entropy? 🕒 || PostDoc at TU Wien

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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 28/08/2026
How does memory help to count? Using n bits, one can count perfectly up to 2^n. Higher numbers can only be counted on average, with an uncertainty growing with the number to be counted. We looked at how this uncertainty can be reduced when using qubits instead: arxiv.org/abs/2608.26240
Two tick distributions, on the left perfectly sharp and on the right broadly distributed around the mean.
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 19/01/2026
From one tick to the next, small timing uncertainties in clocks usually add up because of the independence of errors. Using fermions tunneling through a quantum wire as clock ticks, we found a way to build a clock where errors cancel out rather than accumulate. arxiv.org/abs/2601.10785
Chain of quantum two level systems. Excitations traveling from left to right, each time marking a tick when they leave on the right.
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 02/06/2025
Here, you can see an animation of the excitation travelling around a ring of 50 sites (y-axis = occupation probability, x-axis = where).
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 02/06/2025
What started as informal discussions on the Danube beach in Vienna during QTD2023 has been published at last. Trying to come up with an experimentally feasible quantum clock we came across a rich model – the ring clock – that overturned a common wisdom in the community. doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Copyright by Alexander Rommel / TU Wien.
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 12/05/2025
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 16/01/2025
... and here are the pendula themselves
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 16/01/2025
... and here the pendulum center of mass
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 16/01/2025
Haha, it seems I can not upload Gifs properly 😅 Let's hope this works: here is the 'coolest' animation ...
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 16/01/2025
a) Ignorance about microscopic degrees of freedom and b) a past hypothesis saying you start in a low entropy state. Combined, the assumptions lead to entropy increase over time. For the pendulum, a) is given by the compass needle only seeing the 'center of mass' and b) by the initial configuration.
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 16/01/2025
If we now imagine that in the top right of the setup, you have a compass needle pointing towards the center of mass of the collection of pendulum masses (say the masses are magnetized), the compass needle will have a 'quite random' behavior, as the animations show, but it stays somewhat centered.
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 16/01/2025
Think of a collection of mathematical pendula, all swinging with a different frequency. The time-evolution of this system in the idealized setting without friction is fully reversible.
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 16/01/2025
Now that our recent work on the emergence of a 2nd law of thermodynamics in isolated quantum systems has been published, I thought it may be a good opportunity to share some animations outlining the intuition for the principle behind it. doi.org/10.1103/PRXQ... See thread below 👇
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Florian Meier @flowrian.ch · 06/01/2025
Bonjour Grenoble! Nice to see the beauty of the alps in Austria stretches all the way to France 🏔️ Here to visit the QEI conf. and curious to learn how others think about thermo of quantum computation. Tomorrow I'll talk about work (arXiv:2402.00111) we did in Vienna. Come by if you are around.
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