1 August 2014
The Leverhulme Trust has awarded a grant of £85,000 to Dr Alexander Belton of the department's Analysis and Probability research group, to fund a two-year project entitled Quantum random walks and quasi-free quantum stochastic calculus.

The Leverhulme Trust funding will be used to employ a post-doctoral Senior Research Associate for twenty-four months.

Quantum random walks are mathematical models which describe a quantum-mechanical system interacting periodically with a stream of identical particles, such as photons (light) or atoms. Previous work in this area has required overly simplistic assumptions on these particles (for example, being at absolute-zero temperature) and has provided only a phenomenological description of the resulting behaviour for positive temperatures. The proposed project aims to provide a proper theoretical explanation of the system dynamics for more realistic models, and to explain and extend the links with the quasi-free version of quantum stochastic calculus.