Talks

Particle production can occur in a curved spacetime like, for example, in the case of thermal emission of particles from black holes, otherwise known as Hawking radiation. The Unruh effect is a quantum field theory result that is closely connected to Hawking radiation. It states that accelerated observers associate a thermal bath of particles to the vacuum state of inertial observers. The Unruh effect has been given special attention because contrary to black hole evaporation, it is a prediction made in a flat (Minkowski) spacetime and therefore can be, in principle, tested in the laboratory. Recently, we have investigated the connection between the Unruh effect and classical radiation for a uniformly accelerated particle. This link seems counter-intuitive since the former is a purely quantum effect while the latter is a classic one. Nonetheless, we find that using a full quantum field treatment of the radiation exchanged by an accelerated charge with the surrounding Unruh thermal bath, the resultant power reduces at tree-level to the usual Larmor formula. The results are also consistent with the observation made by Unruh and Wald which states that the emission of a photon in the inertial frame corresponds to the emission or absorption of a photon in the accelerated frame. The fact that the derivation makes the link between the Unruh effect and the Larmor radiation from a uniformly accelerated charged particle clearer will perhaps help in resolving some of the controversies that have surrounded the Unruh effect since its discovery.

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What is a measurement? This, it turns out, is the most difficult question in physics today. In this talk, I will explain why the measurement problem is important and why all attempts to solve it so far have failed. I will then discuss the obvious solution to the problem that was, unfortunately, discarded half a century ago without ever being seriously considered: Superdeterminism. After addressing some common objections to this idea, I will summarize the existing approaches to develop a theory for it.

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The interplay between spontaneous symmetry breaking and topology can result in exotic quantum states of matter. A celebrated example is the quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect, which exhibits an integer quantum Hall effect at zero magnetic field due to topologically nontrivial bands and intrinsic magnetism. In the presence of strong electron-electron interactions, fractional-QAH (FQAH) effect at zero magnetic field can emerge, which is a lattice analog of fractional quantum Hall effect without Landau level formation. In this talk, I will present experimental observation of FQAH effect in twisted MoTe 2 bilayer, using combined magneto- optical and -transport measurements. In addition, we find an anomalous Hall state near the filling factor -1/2, whose behavior resembles that of the composite Fermi liquid phase in the half-filled lowest Landau level of a two-dimensional electron gas at high magnetic field. Direct observation of the FQAH and associated effects paves the way for researching charge fractionalization and anyonic statistics at zero magnetic field.

Reference 1. Observation of Fractionally Quantized Anomalous Hall Effect, Heonjoon Park et al., Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06536-0 (2023);
2. Signatures of Fractional Quantum Anomalous Hall States in Twisted MoTe2 Bilayer, Jiaqi Cai et al., Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06289-w (2023);
3. Programming Correlated Magnetic States via Gate Controlled Moiré Geometry, Eric Anderson et al., Science, https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adg4268 (2023)

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We show that the Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) formula, originally introduced to compute the entropy of a holographic boundary CFT, can be interpreted as entropy of an algebra of bulk gravitational observables. In particular, we show that any Euclidean gravitational path integral satisfying a simple and familiar set of axioms defines type I von Neumann algebras of bulk observables acting on closed codimension-2 asymptotic boundaries. The entropies associated to these algebras, defined via the gravitational path integral, can be written in terms of standard density matrices and standard Hilbert space traces, and in appropriate semiclassical limits are computed by the RT formula with quantum corrections. Our work thus provides a bulk state-counting interpretation of the Ryu-Takayanagi entropy. Since our axioms do not severely constrain UV bulk structures, they may be expected to hold equally well for successful formulations of string field theory, spin-foam models, or any other approach to constructing a UV-complete theory of gravity.

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