Search Talks

The entanglement spectrum, i.e. the logarithm of the eigenvalues of reduced density matrices of
quantum many body wave functions, has been the focus of a rapidly expanding research endeavor recently.
Initially introduced by Li & Haldane in the context of the fractional quantum Hall effect, its usefulness has been
shown to extend to many more fields, such as topological insulators, fractional Chern insulators, spin liquids,
continuous symmetry breaking states, etc.
After a general introduction to the field we review some of our own contributions to the field, in particular the
perturbative structure of the entanglement spectrum in gapped phases, the entanglement spectrum across the
Mott-insulator transition in the Bose-Hubbard model, and the relation of the entanglement spectrum of
(1+1) dimensional quantum critical systems to the operator content of their underlying CFT.

Recent research has suggested deep connections between geometry and entropy. This connection was first seen in black hole thermodynamics, but has been more fully realized in the Ryu-Takayanagi proposal for calculating entanglement entropies in AdS/CFT. We suggest that this connection is even broader: entropy, and in particular compression, are the fundamental building blocks of emergent geometry. We demonstrate how spatial geometry can be derived from the properties of a recursive compression algorithm for the boundary CFT. We propose a general algorithm for constructing MERA-like tensor networks and elucidate connections to the mathematical field of integral geometry.