Talks

The history of human knowledge is often highlighted by our efforts to explore beyond our apparent horizon. In this talk, I will describe how this challenge has now evolved into our quest to understand the physics at/beyond the cosmological horizon, some twenty orders of magnitude above Columbus’s original goal. I also argue why inflationary paradigm predicts the existence of non-trivial physics beyond the cosmological horizon, and how we can use the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect in the Cosmic Microwave Background to probe this physics, including the nature of gravity and primordial non-gaussianity on the horizon scale.

We show that the matrix-model for noncommutative U(n) gauge theory actually describes SU(n) gauge theory coupled to gravity. The nonabelian gauge fields as well as additional scalar fields couple to a dynamical metric G_ab, which is given in terms of a Poisson structure. This leads to a gravity theory which is naturally related to noncommutativity, encoding those degrees of freedom which are usually interpreted as U(1) gauge fields. Essential features such as gravitational waves and the Newtonian limit are reproduced correctly. UV/IR mixing is understood in terms of an induced gravity action. The framework appears suitable for quantizing gravity.

The renormalization group (RG) is one of the conceptual pillars of statistical mechanics and quantum field theory, and a key theoretical element in the modern formulation of critical phenomena and phase transitions. RG transformations are also the basis of numerical approaches to the study of low energy properties and emergent phenomena in quantum many-body systems. In this colloquium I will introduce the notion of \\\"entanglement renormalization\\\" and use it to define a coarse-graining transformation for quantum systems on a lattice [G.Vidal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 220405 (2007)]. The resulting real-space RG approach is able to numerically address 1D and 2D lattice systems with thousands of quantum spins using only very modest computational resources. From the theoretical point of view, entanglement renormalization sheds new light into the structure of correlations in the ground state of extended quantum systems. I will discuss how it leads to a novel, efficient representation for the ground state of a system at a quantum critical point or with topological order.

The basic problem of much of condensed matter and high energy physics, as well as quantum chemistry, is to find the ground state properties of some Hamiltonian. Many algorithms have been invented to deal with this problem, each with different strengths and limitations. Ideas such as entanglement entropy from quantum information theory and quantum computing enable us to understand the difficulty of various problems. I will discuss recent results on area laws and use these to prove that we can use matrix product states to efficiently represent ground states for one-dimensional systems with a spectral gap, while certain other one-dimensional problems, without the gap assumption, almost certainly have no efficient way for us to even represent the ground state on a classical computer. I will also discuss recent results on higher-dimensional matrix product states, in an attempt to extend the remarkable success of matrix product algorithms beyond one dimension.