Among the satellite meetings of the IUPAP StatPhys29 conference was a meeting in Lviv, Ukraine — currently at war. Three of the organizers describe how the meeting came to be and the challenges they faced.

We consider ensembles of pure Gaussian states parametrised by single-mode marginals and (optionally) specific mode-mode correlations. Such ensembles provide a model for the final states when isolated quantum systems thermalise, as they can reproduce thermal properties locally, while being globally pure. By an analysis using real replicas and the coherent state representation of Gaussian states we show that the average entanglement entropy of a small subsystem is the same as the von Neumann entropy of a mixed Gaussian state with the same marginals, but no correlations. Finally, we discuss how these ensembles provide a model for Hawking radiation assuming unitary evolution, and discuss some of their properties in relations to the Page curve of Hawking radiation.

Motivated by a putative model of black holes as quantum objects, we consider what types of operators would have a corresponding spectrum. We find that there are indeed such operators, but of a rather unusual type, and for which the wave functions are only barely localized. We point out a tension between such almost delocalized states and black holes as compact objects.

A black hole evaporates by Hawking radiation. Each mode of that radiation is thermal. If the total state is nevertheless to be pure, modes must be entangled. Estimating the minimum size of this entanglement has been an important outstanding issue. We develop a new theory of constrained random symplectic transformations, based on the assumptions that the total state is pure and Gaussian with given marginals. In the random constrained symplectic model we then compute the distribution of mode-mode correlations, from which we bound mode-mode entanglement. Modes of frequency much larger than [k(B)T(H)(t)/h] are not populated at time t and drop out of the analysis. Among other relatively thinly populated modes (earlytime high-frequency modes and/or late modes of any frequency), we find correlations and hence entanglement to be strongly suppressed. Relatively highly populated modes (early-time low-frequency modes) can, on the other hand, be strongly correlated, but a detailed analysis reveals that they are nevertheless very unlikely to be entangled. Our analysis hence establishes that restoring unitarity after a complete evaporation of a black hole does not require any significant quantum entanglement between any pair of Hawking modes. Our analysis further gives exact general expressions for the distribution of modemode correlations in random, pure, Gaussian states with given marginals, which may have applications beyond black hole physics.

We consider classical spin systems evolving in continuous time with interactions given by a locally tree-like graph. Several approximate analysis methods have earlier been reported based on the idea of Belief Propagation / cavity method. We introduce a new such method which can be derived in a more systematic manner using the theory of Random Point Processes. Within this approach, the master equation governing the system's dynamics is closed via a set of differential equations for the auxiliary cavity probabilities. The numerical results improve on the earlier versions of the closure on several important classes of problems. We re-visit here the cases of the Ising ferromagnet and the Viana-Bray spin-glass model.

This review is about statistical genetics, an interdisciplinary topic between statistical physics and population biology. The focus is on the phase of quasi-linkage equilibrium (QLE). Our goals here are to clarify under which conditions the QLE phase can be expected to hold in population biology and how the stability of the QLE phase is lost. The QLE state, which has many similarities to a thermal equilibrium state in statistical mechanics, was discovered by M Kimura for a two-locus two-allele model, and was extended and generalized to the global genome scale by Neher & Shraiman (2011). What we will refer to as the Kimura-Neher-Shraiman theory describes a population evolving due to the mutations, recombination, natural selection and possibly genetic drift. A QLE phase exists at sufficiently high recombination rate (r) and/or mutation rates mu with respect to selection strength. We show how in QLE it is possible to infer the epistatic parameters of the fitness function from the knowledge of the (dynamical) distribution of genotypes in a population. We further consider the breakdown of the QLE regime for high enough selection strength. We review recent results for the selection-mutation and selection-recombination dynamics. Finally, we identify and characterize a new phase which we call the non-random coexistence where variability persists in the population without either fixating or disappearing.

In 1974 Steven Hawking showed that black holes emit thermal radiation, which eventually causes them to evaporate. The problem of the fate of information in this process is known as the "black hole information paradox". Two main types of resolution postulate either a fundamental loss of information in Nature - hence the breakdown of quantum mechanics - or some sort of new physics, e.g. quantum gravity, which guarantee the global preservation of unitarity. Here we explore the second possibility with the help of recent developments in continuous-variable quantum information. Concretely, we employ the solution to the Gaussian quantum marginal problem to show that the thermality of all individual Hawking modes is consistent with a global pure state of the radiation. Surprisingly, we find out that the mods of radiation of an astrophysical black hole are thermal until the very last burst. In contrast, the single-mode thermality of Hawking radiation originating from microscopic black holes, expected to evaporate through several quanta, is not excluded, though there are constraints on modes' frequencies. Our result paves the way towards a systematic study of multi-mode correlations in Hawking radiation.

We introduce an approach to characterize the dynamics of disordered quantum networks. Each quantum element (i.e., each node) of the network experiences the other nodes as an effective environment that can be self-consistently represented by a Feynman-Vernon influence functional. For networks having the topology of locally treelike graphs, these Feynman-Vernon (FV) functionals can be determined by a new version of the cavity or belief propagation (BP) method. Here, we find the fixed point solution of this version of BP for a network of uniform quantum harmonic oscillators. Then, we estimate the effects of the disorder in these networks within the replica symmetry ansatz. We show that over a large time interval, at small disorder, the real part of the FV functional induces decoherence and classicality while at sufficiently large disorder the Feynman-Vernon functional tends to zero and the coherence survives, signaling in a time setting, the onset of an Anderson's transition.

Whether gravity is quantized remains an open question. To shed light on this problem, various Gedanken experiments have been proposed. One popular example is an interference experiment with a massive system that interacts gravitationally with another distant system, where an apparent paradox arises: even for spacelike separation the outcome of the interference experiment depends on actions on the distant system, leading to a violation of either complementarity or no-signaling. A recent resolution shows that the paradox is avoided when quantizing gravitational radiation and including quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field. Here we show that the paradox in question can also be resolved without considering gravitational radiation, relying only on the Planck length as a limit on spatial resolution. Therefore, in contrast to conclusions previously drawn, we find that the necessity for a quantum field theory of gravity does not follow from so far considered Gedanken experiments of this type. In addition, we point out that in the common realization of the setup the effects are governed by the mass octopole rather than the quadrupole. Our results highlight that no Gedanken experiment to date compels a quantum field theory of gravity, in contrast to the electromagnetic case.

We consider a population evolving due to mutation, selection and recombination, where selection includes single-locus terms (additive fitness) and two-loci terms (pairwise epistatic fitness). We further consider the problem of inferring fitness in the evolutionary dynamics from one or several snapshots of the distribution of genotypes in the population. In recent literature, this has been done by applying the quasi-linkage equilibrium regime, first obtained by Kimura in the limit of high recombination. Here, we show that the approach also works in the interesting regime where the effects of mutations are comparable to or larger than recombination. This leads to a modified main epistatic fitness inference formula where the rates of mutation and recombination occur together. We also derive this formula using by a previously developed Gaussian closure that formally remains valid when recombination is absent. The findings are validated through numerical simulations.