Lecture
Friday, Feb 6, 2026, 5:30 PM

Janet Anders

(Potsdam)

Quantenmechanik und die Verletzung der Bell’schen Ungleichung

In the early days of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger discovered the mathematical possibility of entanglement, an unusually strong type of correlation that caused not a few philosophical headaches. Albert Einstein called the phenomenon “spooky ac-tion at a distance” and argued that it could not occur in physical reality. Later, John Bell put Einstein’s ideas—locality and realism—into a mathematically precise form. Based on these, he established a kind of spookiness inequality that now bears his name: The greater the violation of the inequality, the greater the spookiness. In this lecture, I explain the derivation of Bell’s theorem. Like Einstein, we will see that adherence to Bell’s inequality expresses what we consider normal in our daily lives. Except that quantum mechanics does not adhere to it…

Janet Anders studied physics at the University of Potsdam and received her doctorate in 2008 from the National University of Singapore with a thesis on quantum entanglement. She then worked at University College London (UCL), first as a postdoc, and later as an independent researcher with a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship. In 2013, she founded an independent research group at the University of Exeter focusing on quantum thermodynamics. Since 2019, she has been a professor at the University of Potsdam, where she heads the Department of Theoretical Quantum Physics. With her group, she conducts research on quantum thermodynamics and quantum technologies, in particular on the structure of open quantum systems, spin dynamics in magnetic materials, and quantum sensor technology.

 
The German talks will be simultaneously translated into English.