José Polo-Gómez wins the 2026 Irwin Oppenheim Award
The annual APS prize recognises outstanding early-career research
José Polo-Gómez, a postdoctoral researcher in the Theory division at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, has been awarded the American Physical Society’s (APS) 2026 Irwin Oppenheim Award. The annual prize honours junior scientists for exceptional research published in the APS journal Physical Review E. Polo-Gómez receives the distinction “for showing that the second law of thermodynamics limits the ability to distinguish between quantum states”.
“The prize was far from expected,” says awardee José Polo-Gómez, “The paper it recognises was my only single-author work so far, so I could never have imagined receiving an award for it.”
The Irwin Oppenheim Award recognises outstanding junior research published in the society’s Physical Review E journal. Polo-Gómez’s publication draws inspiration from ideas first introduced by physicist Asher Peres. “In a sense,” the author notes, “he came up with an earlier version of the argument – my work just refines it further.”
The central idea of the prize-winning publication echoes the spirit of the “Maxwell’s demon”, a classic thought experiment at the intersection of physics and information theory. The paper introduces hypothetical entities – so-called “Peres’ demons” – capable of distinguishing between two non-orthogonal quantum states with a given efficiency. By exploiting this ability, the demons are used to construct a thermodynamic cycle. This cycle consists of a series of steps where a gas is manipulated in some ways, and accepts or releases energy in the process. At the end of the cycle, the gas (and the demons) are back to how they were at the beginning.
If these entities are assumed to be too effective at discriminating quantum states, the cycle leads to a violation of the second law of thermodynamics – that is, all the heat provided by the environment can be transformed into work, allowing the construction of a perpetual motion machine. This contradiction establishes a “thermodynamic bound” on how well quantum states can be distinguished. Remarkably, the result relies only on one basic feature of quantum mechanics: linearity, or the superposition principle.
José Polo-Gómez recently joined the Theory division led by Ignacio Cirac as a postdoctoral fellow. His research combines tools from quantum information and quantum field theory. The main body of his work addresses problems related to measurements, causality, and entanglement in quantum field theory, with contributions ranging from black hole physics to thermodynamics.
