Physics Magazine Highlights of 2022
ICFOnian’s work on complex numbers highlighted as one of magazine editors’ 2022 favorites
In a special end of the year feature of Physics Magazine, the editors pick their favorite stories from 2022, citing a wide spectrum of themes. One of their favorites was a Viewpoint article that questions whether complex numbers are just a mathematical convenience and whether a quantum theory could be formulated based on real numbers only. This analysis reviewed two independent experiments that demonstrate that the formulation of quantum mechanics needs to involve complex numbers to reproduce the experimental results correctly. These two experimental studies test the theory published by ICFOnians Marc-Olivier Renou and ICREA Prof Antonio Acín in a paper titled Quantum theory based on real numbers can be experimentally falsified (Nature, 600, 625–629 (2021).
This high impact theoretical work has also received the Paul Ehrenfest Best Paper Award for Quantum Foundations 2022 from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Austria.
Congratulations Toni and Marco!