Antonio Acín

Institut de Ciències Fotòniques

Engineering Sciences

Antonio Acín is an ICREA Research Professor at ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences. He has a degree in Physics from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and in Telecommunication Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He got his PhD in Theoretical Physics in 2001 from the UB. After a post-doctoral stay in Geneva, in the group of Prof. Gisin (GAP-Optique), he joined ICFO in 2003. At ICFO, Acín leads the Quantum Information Theory group. His research has been awarded with 3 grants from the European Research Council: 1 Starting, 1 Proof of Concept and 1 Consolidator Grant, the latter starting in 2014. He also received an AXA Chair in Quantum Information Science in 2016.


Research interests

Most of the research work by Antonio Acín is in quantum information theory. This is a scientific area that studies how information is processed and transmitted when encoded on quantum particles. Using the quantum effects, new information tasks become possible: more powerful computers, unbreakable cryptography protocols and quantum teleportation. It is a very inter-disciplinary area combining tools and concepts from mathematics, computer science, physics and engineering. More recently, Acín's research activity also covers aspects of foundations of quantum physics, quantum thermodynamics, many-body physics and quantum optics.

Selected publications

- Perarnau-Llobet M, Baumer E, Hovhannisyan KV, Huber M & Acin A 2017, 'No-Go Theorem for the Characterization of Work Fluctuations in Coherent Quantum Systems', Physical Review Letters, 118, 7, 070601.

- Bendersky A, Senno G, de la Torre G, Figueira S & Acin A 2017, 'Nonsignaling Deterministic Models for Nonlocal Correlations have to be Uncomputable', Physical Review Letters, 118, 13, 130401.

- Curchod FJ, Johansson M, Augusiak R, Hoban MJ, Wittek P & Acin A 2017, 'Unbounded randomness certification using sequences of measurements', Physical Review A, 95, 2.

- Baccari F, Cavalcanti D, Wittek P & Acin A 2017, 'Efficient Device-Independent Entanglement Detection for Multipartite Systems', Physical Review X, 7, 2, 021042.

- Salavrakos A, Augusiak R, Tura J, Wittek P, Acin A & Pironio S 2017, 'Bell Inequalities Tailored to Maximally Entangled States', Physical Review Letters, 119, 4, 040402.

- Oszmaniec M, Guerini L, Wittek P & Acin A 2017, 'Simulating Positive-Operator-Valued Measures with Projective Measurements', Physical Review Letters, 119, 19, 190501.

- Hernández-Santana S, Gogolin C, Cirac JI & Acín A 2017, 'Correlation decay in fermionic lattice systems with power-law interactions at non-zero temperature', Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 119, pp. 110601.

- Bera MN, Acín A, Kús M, Mitchell M & Lewenstein M 2017, 'Randomness in Quantum Mechanics: Philosophy, Physics and Technology', Rep. Prog. Phys. vol. 80, pp. 124001.

- Bylicka B, Johansson M & Acin A 2017, 'Constructive Method for Detecting the Information Backflow of Non-Markovian Dynamics', Physical Review Letters, 118, 12, 120501.

- Tura J, De las Cuevas G, Augusiak R, Lewenstein M, Acin A & Cirac JI 2017, 'Energy as a Detector of Nonlocality of Many-Body Spin Systems', Physical Review X, 7, 2, 021005.