Florian Meier

Greetings! Nice to see you have found my website. I’m Florian Meier, originally from Switzerland and currently postdoctoral researcher in the groups of Thomas Pohl (Institute for Theoretical Physics) and Maximilian Lock (Atominstitut) at the Technische Universität Wien. Before, I did my PhD with Marcus Huber in the QuIT Group at Atominstitut, Technische Universität Wien.

I research clocks, not only because I am from Switzerland, but because a better understanding of the fundamentals of timekeeping may teach us something deep about the nature of time itself. So, I try to understand them, not to sell them. The central question I have been thinking about is whether the physical laws of nature impose any limits on how precise a clock can.

This is what I mostly work on in my research, using tools from non-equilibrium quantum systems, stochastic thermodynamics, and many-body physics. Recently, I also started thinking about quantum time crystals, primarily because I wanted to understand them, not because of the hype. Other questions I care about are:

How can we reconcile macroscopic/coarse-grained equilibrium behavior with an underlying time-reversal symmetric (Schrödinger) description of quantum systems?
What is a quantum measurement really?
How is computational performance, and how are computational notions of complexity related to physical thermodynamic quantities?
Can we find a fully self-contained, thermodynamic description for quantum control?

I will add a detailed research page soon.

news

21. Sep 2026	Together with Hayata Yamasaki (University Tokyo), we posted our preprint on a “Thermodynamic Proof of Quantumness Without Structure”: arXiv:2609.25211 [quant-ph]
26. Aug 2026	Together with Bita Olamaei (TU Wien) et al, we posted our preprint on “Least Variable Quantum Counting Processes”: arXiv:2608.26240 [quant-ph]
8. May 2026	It appears as if I finished my PhD with Marcus Huber at TU Wien. For the rest of 2026 I will work with Thomas Pohl (Institut für theoretische Physik) and Maximilian Lock (Atominstitut) as a postdoc.

selected publications

arXiv

Exponential gain in clock precision using quantum correlated ticks

Florian Meier, Yuri Minoguchi, Gianmichele Blasi, and 2 more authors

preprint arXiv:2601.10785 [quant-ph] (2026)

Under review

abs doi arXiv

Creating precise timing devices at ultra-short time scales is not just an important technological challenge, but confronts us with foundational questions about timekeeping’s ultimate precision limits. Research on clocks has either focused on long-term stability using an oscillator stabilized by a level transition, limiting precision at short timescales, or on making individual stochastic ticks as precise as possible. Here, we prove the viability of a conceptually different avenue: the autonomous self-correction of consecutive ticks by quantum correlations. This provides a new paradigm that integrates the advantages and insights from quantum transport theory to operate clocks at ultra-short timescales. We fully solve a model of coupled quantum systems and show how the emergent Pauli exclusion principle correlates the clock at the quantum level yielding an exponential advantage in precision. We furthermore demonstrate through simulations with realistic imperfections that this remarkable gain in precision remains stable providing a roadmap for implementation with contemporary quantum technologies.
Nat. Phys.

Precision is not limited by the second law of thermodynamics

Florian Meier, Yuri Minoguchi, Simon Sundelin, and 4 more authors

Nature Physics 21 (7), 1147–1152 (2025)

abs doi arXiv

Physical devices operating out of equilibrium are inherently affected by thermal fluctuations, limiting their operational precision. This issue is pronounced at microscopic and especially quantum scales and can only be mitigated by incurring additional entropy dissipation. Understanding this constraint is crucial for both fundamental physics and technological design. For instance, clocks are inherently governed by the second law of thermodynamics and need a thermodynamic flux towards equilibrium to measure time, which results in a minimum entropy dissipation per clock tick. Classical and quantum models and experiments often show a linear relationship between precision and dissipation, but the ultimate bounds on this relationship are unknown. Our theoretical discovery presents an extensible quantum many-body system that achieves clock precision scaling exponentially with entropy dissipation. This finding demonstrates that coherent quantum dynamics can surpass the traditional thermodynamic precision limits, potentially guiding the development of future high-precision, low-dissipation quantum devices.

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