QFT entanglement bounds from expanding universe and from thermodynamics

Note: 3:30 PM
Speaker: John McGreevy, University of California, San Diego

When: April 17, 2015 (Fri), 03:30PM to 04:30PM (add to my calendar)
Location: PRB 595

This event is part of the HET Seminar Series.

Abstract: In the groundstates of interacting quantum field theories (QFTs) and interesting states of matter, the microscopic degrees of freedom are entangled with each other. The structure of this entanglement, and in particular its scaling with the size of a subregion, encodes characteristic features of quantum phases. Furthermore, this scaling quantifies the resources required to construct an efficient representation of the wavefunction. In this talk, I will discuss some new approaches to understanding the subregion entanglement entropy in groundstates of local Hamiltonians in the frontier cases of gapped systems in d>1 and systems without a mass gap. The talk is based on 1407.8203 and work in progress with Brian Swingle.