High Energy Theory Seminar

The Entanglement Bootstrap is a program to derive the universal properties of a phase of matter from a single representative state on a topologically-trivial region.  Much (perhaps all) of the structure of topological quantum field theory can be extracted starting from a state satisfying two axioms that implement the area law for entanglement.  This talk will focus on recent progress (with Bowen Shi and Jin-Long Huang) using this approach to prove remote detectability of topological excitations in various dimensions.  This is an axiom of topological field theory.  Two key ideas are a quantum avatar of Kirby's torus trick to construct states on closed manifolds, and the new concept of pairing manifold, which is a closed manifold associated with a pair of conjugate excitation types that encodes their braiding matrix.  The pairing manifold also produces Verlinde formulae relating the braiding matrix to the structure constants of a generalized symmetry algebra of flexible operators.

In person attendees (469 Lauritsen) must have a valid Caltech ID.

Contact theoryinfo@caltech.edu for Zoom information.