Andreas Winter

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

Andreas Winter was born in Altötting, a small rural town near Munich, known also as the Heart of Bavaria. After developing an infatuation with science early on, and in particular with mathematics, he decided to study this subject in Konstanz and Berlin. He graduated in 1997 from the Freie Universität Berlin, and went on to obtain a doctorate in mathematics from the Universität Bielefeld in 1999, with the late Rudolf Ahlswede. In 2001 he joined the quantum information group in Bristol as a postdoc, became Lecturer in Applied Mathematics there in 2003, and Professor of the Physics of Information in 2006. In 2012 he left Bristol after 11 years, to move to the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona as ICREA Research Professor, where he is now part of the quantum information group.


Research interests

I work on quantum information, especially quantum Shannon theory, which aims at incorporating information-theoretic ideas into physics. The Shannon theoretic approach has succeeded in quantifying entanglement as a resource in information processing task, and likewise for other properties of quantum systems such as channel and storage capacities of quantum systems. One of my favourite topics is the interplay between classical and quantum information, evident in the intricate structure of local operations in composite quantum systems (LOCC), such as data hiding or “information locking”. I also work on additivity and non-additivity of quantum channel capacities, quantum data compression, and zero-error quantum communication. Further quantum information interests include statistical mechanics, entropy characterization and entanglement measures. But at heart I am a mathematician and will still get fascinated by classic problems: existence of Hadamard matrices, incompleteness, etc.

Selected publications

– Paulsen V I, Severini S, Stahlke D, Todorov I G & Winter A 2016, ‘Estimating quantum chromatic numbers’, J. Func. Anal., vol. 270, no. 6, pp. 2188-2222.

Winter A & Yang D 2016, ‘Operational Resource Theory of Coherence’, Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 116, 120404.

Winter A 2016, ‘Tight Uniform Continuity Bounds for Quantum Entropies: Conditional Entropy, Relative Entropy Distance and Energy Constraints’, Commun. Math. Phys., vol. 347, no. 1, pp. 291-313.

– Lancien C, Di Martino S, Huber M, Piani M, Adesso G & Winter A 2016, ‘Should Entanglement Measures be Monogamous or Faithful?’, Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 117, 060501.

– Yunger Halpern N, Faist Ph, Oppenheim J & Winter A 2016, ‘Microcanonical and resource-theoretic derivations of the thermal state of a quantum system with noncommuting charges’, Nature Commun., vol. 7, 12051.

– Duan R, Severini S & Winter A 2016, ‘On zero-error communication via quantum channels in the presence of noiseless feedback’, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 62, no. 9, pp. 5260-5277.

– Monras A & Winter A 2016, ‘Quantum learning of classical stochastic processes: The Completely-Positive Realization Problem’, J. Math. Phys., vol. 57, 015219.

– Lancien C & Winter A 2016, ‘Parallel repetition and concentration for (sub-)no-signalling games via a flexible constrained de Finetti reduction’, Chicago J. Theor. Comput. Sci., vol. 2016, 11.

– Duan R & Winter A 2016, ‘No-Signalling-Assisted Zero-Error Capacity of Quantum Channels and an Information Theoretic Interpretation of the Lovasz Number’, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 891-914.


Selected research activities

Organisation “Beyond IID in Information Theory 4”, 18-22/7/2016, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, uniting 80 information theory experts. Programme at https://sites.google.com/site/beyondiid4/. The next editions (2017 in Singapore and 2018 in Cambridge) are already in preparation.