Physics Colloquium: Spacetime from Entanglement

Please join the Physics Department for a talk by Claire Zukowski, Columbia University, on "Spacetime from Entanglement."  We will have tea at 4:10 in the lobby of the Hugel Science Center, followed by the talk at 4:30 in Hugel Science Center room 100.

Abstract: In thermodynamics entropy usually scales like the volume, but many gravitational systems seem to exhibit a surprising area-law scaling of entropy. This lies at the root of the holographic principle, the conjecture that degrees of freedom in quantum gravity can be encoded in one lower dimension. In this talk, we will consider a concrete realization of holography via the correspondence between a theory of gravity and a quantum mechanical theory in one lower dimension. In this setting, entanglement entropies are equal to the areas of certain surfaces in the gravitational theory. We will see that this relation leads to the emergence of a spacetime from entanglement, and we will explore this emergent geometry in several different setups.