The Quantum Center - Weekly Seminar

Tuesday,March 22, at 12:00

Danciger B building – Seminars Room

Refreshments will be served at 11:45

“From quantum information to particlephysics via tensor network and quantum simulations”

Speaker: Dr. Johannes Knaute 

Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Abstract

Quantuminformation concepts become increasingly important in condensed matter,particle and gravitational physics as a joint effort. In particular, they canprovide new insights for the understanding of emergent phenomena of QFTs underextreme conditions, which often pose significant challenges for theirtheoretical treatment. As one such example, I consider in this talk the meltingof mesons as nonperturbative bound states at high temperatures. This process isrelevant for the phenomenological description of nuclear collisions and in itsinverse form for the understanding of the quark-gluon plasma in the earlyuniverse. While QCD and holographic approaches indicate the melting processthrough a thermal broadening of in-medium spectral functions, we want tomotivate a new paradigm here by studying entanglement properties. As a firststep in this direction, we employ tensor network techniques to studyentanglement entropies in a static and dynamical setting (generated through aquantum quench) of the two-dimensional Ising QFT. We explain observed featuresat high enough temperatures through the fact that meson states in the quantummany-body system are melted and argue that the considered entanglement measurescan serve as a witness of that process. We then explore the capabilities ofanalog quantum simulations with trapped ions to detect relativistic mesonspectra on current devices. Such simulations open the prospect to studyfundamental physical effects beyond the capability of classical resources.Following this line of research, I shortly motivate future explorations ofhigher-dimensional gauge theories and further quantum quench studies.