Meet a CQTian: Dario Poletti

Dario is pictured here in Trieste, Italy.

You are currently a CQT Fellow but your association with CQT began years before. Could you share more about your history with the Centre?

I first got in touch with people at CQT before CQT existed in 2003. At that time, I was an undergraduate at Politecnico di Milano and Ecole Centrale Paris and wanted to come to Singapore for an internship and visit my then girlfriend, now wife, who is Singaporean. I’m very grateful that Principal Investigator Dagomir Kaszlikowski accepted me to do an internship with him for six weeks.

I came back to Singapore in 2004 on exchange during my Master’s degree and I was also a PhD student at the NUS Physics Department when CQT was established in 2007. I did my postdoc with Berge Englert’s group in 2009.

Over the years, I’ve interacted, visited and worked with many people at CQT. So, I would say I have strong, close ties with CQT.

What has your impression of CQT been like?

Overall, people are very knowledgeable, passionate, and driven. There is a good variety of different research activities so you can always learn a lot. Over the years, the scale has grown and the quality of invited speakers and visitors, even student visitors, is super high. I think that CQT has been attractive for people.

At the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), you are also Associate Professor, Head of Cluster, Science, Mathematics and Technology, and Programme Director of the SUTD Honours and Research Programme. How do you juggle your different roles?

I'm not sure I can. I'm trying hard! In my current roles at SUTD, I can help SUTD and the department in their exciting missions, so it is service which I find important and meaningful. It takes some time from research but there is more that we need to do for our institutions and for the community at large.

I’m also involved with the Institute of Physics Singapore, and have served for four years as Secretary and Council member.

What are you currently working on?

There are a few different directions, but the main theme is many-body quantum systems and their dynamics. I study both fundamental questions and also develop classical numerical methods, like tensor and neural networks, to characterise and study these systems.

These complex quantum systems have beautiful properties. Sometimes you see the emergence of collective or statistical mechanics behaviour, and in general the topic of chaos is fascinating. More in detail, we have particular focus on questions of transport, equilibration and thermodynamics. And with quantum simulators and processors getting better, we can ask ourselves how they can be used to better understand many-body quantum systems and vice versa. With the techniques we’ve been developing, we also try to apply them outside of physics and see how they work.

How do you apply the techniques outside of physics?

Techniques like tensor networks are so called quantum-inspired because they were developed in the field of quantum physics to understand complex quantum setups. It turns out that they can be useful also outside of the domain they were originally developed for! There are nice examples of applications of tensor networks in fields like fluid dynamics, finance etc.

We have been using tensor networks for classical machine learning tasks, from prototypical problems as evolution of deterministic or probabilistic cellular automata, and for discrete non-linear diffusion equations, but also to learn the effects of noise in a quantum processor. This is working quite well, and now we are also exploring with real world data, not simulated one. Fingers crossed!

What drew you to quantum physics research?

I find it very fascinating. Of course, there are applications, and it is amazing how much our understanding and the development of the technology is getting better and better. But the way it started for me was infatuation maybe. I didn’t know anything about quantum physics when I found it interesting. It became more interesting the more I knew.

What do you enjoy outside of work?

I have two kids, who take up quite a bit of my time. I ferry them around to their basketball trainings or watch them play basketball. I play Ultimate Frisbee competitively although now I have less time for it. If I’m not training, and I do find some time, I go for short, fast jogs.

Is there anything about yourself that other people may be surprised to know?

People find it interesting that, as an Italian, I don't drink coffee, tea or alcohol and I also don't like soccer.