Gravity creates space-time boundaries that limit observables without limiting the flow of energy and information. This means that quantum systems in cosmology are often open systems: to describe them we must allow for the effects of interaction with an unobservable environment. In this talk I will show what happens when we look at familiar closed and isolated quantum systems as ensembles of open systems and introduce a class of out-of-equilibrium qubit networks constructed to mimic some key features of cosmology. I will use these models to illustrate how open quantum systems cosmology may point to new ways of thinking about long-standing puzzles on the origin and fundamental nature of the universe.
Sarah Shandera is a Professor of Physics and the Director of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos at Penn State. She received her PhD in physics from Cornell University in 2006 and held postdoctoral positions at Columbia University’s Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics before joining the faculty at Pennsylvania State University in 2011.