Umesh Vazirani: On the complexity of quantum many body systems

The ground state of a quantum system of n particles is the eigenvector of minimum eigenvalue of a matrix (the Hamiltonian) of dimension that scales exponentially in n. In this talk I will describe a recent body of work, inspired by concepts from quantum computation and information theory that shows that for a large class of 1D quantum systems the solution can be succinctly represented and computed in polynomial time on a classical computer. Slides: https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/ICM2022/Presentation-slides/69-Umesh%20Vazirani.pdf