Physics (Internal)

Schrodinger’s clowder: entanglement in many-body physics

This event is part of the Physics Department Colloquia Series.

Nearly 80 years after Schrodinger introduced his famous cat, quantum entanglement has fuelled a conceptual revolution in many-body quantum physics. What Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen once found anathema, we now understand as a quantitative tool for classifying the allowed quantum phases of matter, analyzing the performance of quantum simulations and diagnosing thermalization. In this talk, I will re-introduce you to entanglement from this many-body point of view. We will see how the entanglement entropy organizes quantum phases of matter in the absence of local order parameters and how the entanglement spectrum probes the bulk-boundary correspondence in such quantum phases. Finally, we will turn to the dynamics of entanglement and how it has offered a phenomenological understanding of the newly discovered many-body localized phase.