Talks

A well-established approach to solving interacting quantum systems is variational Monte Carlo. There is a lot of renewed interest in it since the introduction of neural networks as a highly expressive and unbiased variational ansatz. Similar to more traditional ansätze, neural networks struggle with solving frustrated quantum systems. A conjecture has been made that the cause of these difficulties lies in the sign structures of the ground state wavefunctions. Here, we will discuss these sign structures in more detail and try to analyze how complex they really are by establishing a connection to classical Ising models.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99087954160?pwd=Vm5zWWRFbHBwVFR1RHZMc3ptem03QT09

Recent advances in mechanical sensing technologies have led to the suggestion that heavy dark matter candidates around the Planck mass range could be detected through their gravitational interaction alone. The Windchime collaboration is developing the necessary techniques, systems, and experimental apparatus using arrays of optomechanical sensors that operate in the regime of high-bandwidth force detection, i.e., impulse metrology.  Today's sensors can be limited by the added noise due to the act of measurement itself. Techniques to go beyond this limit include squeezing of the light used for measurement and backaction evading measurement by estimating quantum non-demolition operators — typically the momentum of a mechanical resonator well above its resonance frequency. In this talk, we will discuss the theoretical limits to noise reduction using such quantum enhanced readout techniques for these optomechanical sensors.

 In holography, spacetime is emergent and its properties depend on the entanglement structure of the dual theory. An interesting question is how changes in the entanglement structure affect the bulk dual description. In this talk, I will describe how local projective measurements performed on a subregion  of the boundary theory modify the bulk dual spacetime. The post-measurement bulk is cut off by end-of-the-world branes and is dual to the complementary unmeasured region . Using a bulk calculation in —which involves a phase transition triggered by the measurement—and tensor network models of holography, I will show that the portion of bulk preserved after the measurement depends on the size of  and the state we project on. Interestingly, the post-measurement bulk includes regions that were part of the entanglement wedge of  before the measurement. Our results indicate that the effect of a measurement performed on a subregion  of the boundary is to teleport part of the bulk information contained in  into the complementary region . Finally, I will comment on applications to the eternal black hole in JT gravity (dual to the SYK thermofield double state) and the relationship between measurements and traversable wormholes.

Cosmological models and black holes belong to classes of space-time metrics defined in terms of a finite number of degrees of freedom, for which the Einstein–Hilbert action reduces to a one-dimensional mechanical model. We investigate their classical symmetries and the algebra of the corresponding Noether charges. These dynamical symmetries have a geometric interpretation, not in terms of spacetime geometry, but in terms of motion on the field space. Moreover, they interplay with the fiducial scales, introduced to regulate the homogenous model, suggesting a relationship with the boundary symmetries of the full theory.

Finally, the existence of these symmetries unravels new aspects of the physics of black holes and cosmology. It opens the way towards a rigorous group quantization of the reduced model and to the study of their holographic properties. It might have significant consequences on the propagation of test fields and the corresponding perturbation theory.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/92846533238?pwd=cERGUjd6OXB5S0ZaSzVIdVJyMHZxUT09