Benjamin Doyon -- 'The entanglement entropy and its universal behaviour in one dimension'

Tuesday 11 Mar 2008, 16:15 → 18:00 Europe/London

OC218

Entanglement is a fundamental charasteristic of quantum mechanics: a measurement at a point in space may affect instantaneously measurements performed elsewhere in a way that cannot be described by local variables. The entanglement entropy is a proposed measure of entanglement in a pure quantum state, and it also occurs in the study of black hole entropy. I will explain what entanglement entropy is and some of its basic properties, and I will describe what happens with it for the ground state of quantum chains near to a critical point. It is related to interesting geometries and it turns out that it encodes neatly important universal information about the region around the critical point.