Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano

Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and of the American Physical Society. He won the third prize for the FQXi essay world competitions of 2011, 2012 and 2013. His paper on the informational derivation of quantum theory has been selected for an APS Viewpoint.

D'Ariano has played a major role in making quantum information theory a new paradigm for the foundations of quantum theory and fundamental physics in general. In 2010, he proposed a set of information-theoretical postulates for a rigorous derivation of (finite-dimensional) Quantum Theory, a derivation subsequently achieved in his collaboration with Giulio Chiribella and Paolo Perinotti. This project also led to a new way of understanding, working with, and developing quantum theory, presented in a comprehensive textbook entitled Quantum Theory from First Principles.

In the mid 2010s, D'Ariano extended this program to a derivation of Quantum Field Theory from informational-theoretical postulates, which enabled him and his team to derive the complete free Quantum field theory. A historical perspective, from Dirac's discovery of quantum electrodynamics to the present time, on this work was given by Arkady Plotnitsky in The Principles of Quantum Theory, From Planck's Quanta to the Higgs Boson. In an article in New Scientist, Lucien Hardy wrote that "their work and their approach is extraordinary", and Časlav Brukner wrote that he was "impressed" by their work writing that "there's something deep about quantum mechanics in this work".

At the time of his appointment, there were no PhD schools in Italy and D'Ariano became one of the first PhD supervisors in the country. He founded the Quantum Information Theory Group (QUIT) in 2000 and took on the role of the group leader. In the same year, he was also selected as a member of the Photonic Communication and Computing at Northwestern University.

Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano (born 11 May 1955) is an Italian quantum physicist. He is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Pavia, where he is the leader of the QUIT (Quantum Information Theory) group. He is a member of the Center of Photonic Communication and Computing at Northwestern University; a member of the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere; and a member of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi).

D'Ariano was born on 11 May 1955. He got Laurea cum laude in Physics in 1978 from Pavia University. In 1978, he started a research fellowship in Polymer Science at Politecnico di Milano and in 1979, a research fellowship at Pavia University. In 1984, he was appointed as research assistant at the University of Pavia and as a result of national competitions he became associate professor in 1992 and full professor in 2000.