Sebastian Deffner


Sebastian Deffner is a German theoretical physicist and a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is known for his major contributions to the development of quantum thermodynamics with focus on the thermodynamics of quantum information, quantum speed limit for open systems, quantum control and shortcuts to adiabaticity. He is also the co-author, with Steve Campbell, of the textbook Quantum Thermodynamics: An introduction to the thermodynamics of quantum information, which is the first graduate level textbook in the field of quantum thermodynamics.

Education

Deffner received his Diplom-Physiker in 2008 from the University of Augsburg; and he received his doctorate, Doctor rerum naturalium, with highest distinction from the same university in 2011 under the supervision of Eric Lutz.

Career

From 2008 until 2011, Deffner was a research fellow at the University of Augsburg. From 2011 to 2014, he was a Research Associate in the group of Christopher Jarzynski at the University of Maryland, College Park for which he had received the prestigious DAAD postdoctoral fellowship.
From 2014 to 2016, he took up the position of a Director’s Funded Postdoctoral Fellow with Wojciech H. Zurek at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Since 2016, he has held a position as a faculty member of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he leads the quantum thermodynamics group, and a position as a Visiting Professor at the University of Campinas in Brazil.

Honors and Awards

Deffner’s contributions to quantum thermodynamics have been recognized through the 2016 Early Career Award from IOP’s New Journal of Physics, as well as the Leon Heller Postdoctoral Publication Prize from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2016. To date, Deffner has been a reviewer for more than ten international funding agencies including The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, and The United States Department of Energy. He has also been a reviewer for more than thirty high-ranking journals. For these efforts, he was named Outstanding Reviewer for New Journal of Physics in 2016, Outstanding Reviewer for Annals of Physics in 2016, and APS Outstanding Referee in 2017.
Since 2017, Deffner has been a member of the international editorial board for IOP’s Journal of Physics Communications, and since 2019 he has been on the editorial advisory board of Journal of Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics, and a member of the Section Board for Quantum Information of Entropy. From 2020 through 2021, Deffner will be a Guest editor for the Special Issue in Entropy: Thermodynamics of Quantum Information. Moreover, he is also a member of the inaugural editorial board of PRX Quantum.
Below, is a list of Deffner’s honors and awards to date,

Notable publications

Deffner investigates the nonequilibrium properties of nanosystems operating far from thermal equilibrium. To that end, he employs tools from statistical physics, open quantum dynamics, quantum information theory, quantum optics, quantum field theory, condensed matter theory, and optimal control theory. Here is a list of Deffner’s most notable work,
A complete list of Deffner’s publications can be found or

See Also