in.Q had great fun at QTD 2025

The annual Quantum Thermodynamics conference made its debut in Asia this year, and we at Singapore were truly honoured to host our wonderful global quantum thermo community! The event was buzzing with exciting talks and poster presentations on a wide range of topics, from the limits of quantum clocks and the fundamentals of equilibration, to the emergence of the second law, many-body physics, thermodynamic computing, and so much more. It was super inspiring to hear about the amazing work being done by our colleagues from around the world, and I’ve come away with more motivation to press on contributing to the field -- hoping to increase its richness and coherence ;)

in.Q is especially proud to have our own group members, Jeongrak and Taufiq, to share updates on our latest research.

Taufiq spoke about our ongoing friendly collaboration with the Atomchip group in Vienna, where we’re applying our new common mode measurement technique for low-dimensional quantum gases to tackle the real physics problem of observing thermalization in near-integrable quantum systems.

Meanwhile, Jeongrak presented how a thermodynamically inspired framework, i.e. quantum imaginary-time evolution, is driving progress in quantum algorithms, giving us rigorous performance guarantees in a field dominated by heuristics. We hope this is the start of a deeper conversation between the two fields~

It's worth also mentioning that Xueyuan, our collaborator and a long-term visitor at the group of Valerio Scarani gave a nice talk showcasing our recent results in resource-theoretic thermodynamics: on one hand, she reported joint work with Valerio on algorithmic cooling and steps on quantifying the complexity of cooling processes via a collisional model setting, and on the other hand also shared our recent findings on Gaussian thermal operations! Stay tuned for the arXiv update (which, I hope, will be ``soon".....)

We hope our contributions helped make the conference even more interesting for our fellow academics!

While Nelly was officially listed as part of the local organizing committee, it was really Jeongrak, Ray, Bi Hong, Taufiq and all the inQlings who worked tirelessly to organize (or help out) this conference, welcome our guests, and manage the logistics behind the scenes. Meanwhile, Nelly enjoyed being part of the programme committee, chairing sessions, judging posters, and helping our international friends feel at home. Although, I admit, that was a lot of socializing for the introvert... but definitely worth it :D