Jonathan Oppenheim

Jonathan Oppenheim
Born1970 (age 55–56)
Cape Town, South Africa
EducationUniversity of Toronto (BSc, 1993)
University of British Columbia (PhD, 2000)
AwardsRoyal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award
EPSRC Established Career Fellowship
Scientific career
Fieldsquantum information theory
quantum gravity
WorkplacesUniversity College London
University of Cambridge
Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University
University of Alberta
ThesisQuantum Time (2000)
Bill Unruh
Websitewww.ucl.ac.uk/oppenheim/

Jonathan Oppenheim is a professor of physics at University College London. He is an expert in quantum information theory and quantum gravity.

Life

Oppenheim obtained a bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto in 1993 and PhD at the University of British Columbia in 2001. His PhD thesis titled Quantum Time, focused on time ordering in quantum mechanics and was supervised by Bill Unruh.

In 2004, he was a postdoctoral researcher under Jacob Bekenstein and a Royal Society University Fellow at the University of Cambridge before moving to University College London.

In 2005, together with Michał Horodecki and Andreas Winter, Oppenheim discovered quantum state-merging and used this primitive to show that quantum information could be negative. Following on this work, Oppenheim and collaborators have developed a resource theory for thermodynamics on the nano and quantum scale.

In 2017, Oppenheim and Lluis Masanes derived the third law of thermodynamics using quantum information arguments and set a bound to the speed at which information can be erased.

Oppenheim published a proposal in 2023 for a hybrid theory that couples classical general relativity with quantum field theory. According to this proposal, spacetime is not quantized but smooth and continuous, and is subject to random fluctuations.

Edible ballot society

As a student, Oppenheim was involved in the Edible Ballot Society which satirically advanced eating ballots to highlight the democracy gap in electoral politics. He was arrested at the 1997 APEC protests on University of British Columbia campus. He withdrew from the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP following the refusal of the Prime Minister to testify. His group was responsible for smuggling a siege catapult into the medieval city of Quebec during the Summit of Americas, 2001. It was used to lob teddy bears.

Selected publications

References

  1. ↑ "Jonathan Oppenheim". IEEE. Retrieved 18 March 2024.
  2. 1 2 "Jonathan Oppenheim". Simons Foundation. 22 January 2016. Retrieved 18 March 2024.
  3. ↑ Horodecki, Michał; Oppenheim, Jonathan; Winter, Andreas (2005). "Partial quantum information". Nature. 436 (7051): 673–676. arXiv:quant-ph/0505062. doi:10.1038/nature03909. ISSN 1476-4687.
  4. ↑ Horodecki, Michał; Oppenheim, Jonathan (2013-06-26). "Fundamental limitations for quantum and nanoscale thermodynamics". Nature Communications. 4 (1). arXiv:1111.3834. doi:10.1038/ncomms3059. ISSN 2041-1723.
  5. ↑ Brandão, Fernando; Horodecki, Michał; Ng, Nelly; Oppenheim, Jonathan; Wehner, Stephanie (2015-03-17). "The second laws of quantum thermodynamics". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112 (11): 3275–3279. arXiv:1305.5278. Bibcode:2015PNAS..112.3275B. doi:10.1073/pnas.1411728112. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 4372001. PMID 25675476.
  6. ↑ Crane, Leah (14 March 2017). "Cooling to absolute zero mathematically outlawed after a century". New Scientist. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
  7. ↑ Masanes, Lluís; Oppenheim, Jonathan (2017). "A general derivation and quantification of the third law of thermodynamics". Nature Communications. 8 14538. arXiv:1412.3828. Bibcode:2017NatCo...814538M. doi:10.1038/ncomms14538. PMC 5355879. PMID 28290452.
  8. ↑ Jonathan Oppenheim (2023). "A Postquantum Theory of Classical Gravity?". Physical Review X. 13 (4) 041040. arXiv:1811.03116. doi:10.1103/PhysRevX.13.041040. Retrieved 2024-04-03.
  9. ↑ Hannah Devlin (2023-12-04). "'Wobbly spacetime' may help resolve contradictory physics theories". The Guardian. Retrieved 2023-12-17.
  10. ↑ Pue, W. Wesley (2000). Pepper in our Eyes: the APEC Affair. Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press. ISBN 978-0-7748-0779-1.
  11. ↑ Clark, Campbell (March 27, 2002). "APEC activists deserve an apology, RCMP told". The Globe and Mail.
  12. ↑ Armstrong, Jane (March 1, 2000). "Protesters withdraw complaints from APEC summit inquiry". The Globe and Mail.
  13. ↑ "University of BC timeline".
  14. ↑ Mitchell, Dave. "Case Study: The Teddy Bear Catapult". Beautiful Trouble. Retrieved 13 May 2015.
  15. ↑ Hanes, Allison (May 1, 2001). "The great teddy-bear turn-in". The Gazette (Montreal).
  16. ↑ "Group Claims Responsibility". 10 October 2008.
  17. ↑ "Quantum physicist helps travellers out of a hole". 26 September 2011.