A Brief History of Quantum Speed Limits in Isolated Systems

Quantum speed limits (QSLs) provide lower bounds on the time that a physical system needs to evolve between given quantum states and thus identify the characteristic timescales of quantum dynamics. In this introductory chapter, we shall briefly review the developments of this prolific research field over the past seventy years. Since in this thesis we aim at characterizing unitary dynamics, we shall exclusively focus on QSLs for isolated systems. We refer to the works [1–4] and the review [5] for the formulation of QSLs on open quantum systems.