2020 Virtual undergraduate Research symposium

Expanding the Connection Between Entropy and Gravity Beyond Minkowski Backgrounds


PROJECT NUMBER: 97

AUTHOR: Madison Swirtz, Physics | MENTOR: Alex Flournoy, Physics

 

ABSTRACT

One of the deepest problems in physics is the unification of gravitation, or general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Recent developments in physics have suggested that gravity might emerge from quantum mechanics. We consider describing an emergent dynamical spacetime geometry using the entanglement properties of a quantum state. While there has been progress in holographic regimes such as the AdS/CFT correspondence where gravitation in the higher dimensional Anti de Sitter spacetime is described by quantum entanglement in the one dimension less boundary conformal field theory, we know that our universe is not AdS and hence does not exhibit this holography. Working instead with quantum states in the same dimension as the spacetime, we consider small perturbations of a spacetime geometry which can be described with Hilbert spaces that can be decomposed into factors which correspond to local regions of the bulk spacetime. This method can be used to expand the relationship between bulk geometry and entanglement entropy to be used for more general geometries.

 

VISUAL PRESENTATION

 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Madison Swirtz is a Engineering Physics major in her junior year at Mines. She was a recipient of the Mines Undergraduate Research Fellowship for the 2019-2020 academic year, and used this funding to explore emergent gravity with Dr. Alex Flournoy. In her senior year, she will continue working on a project relating general relativity to quantum mechanics with Dr. Flournoy. She plans to continue her education into graduate school, where she hopes to pursue these fundamental theories of physics.

 


1 Comment

  1. This looks like really exciting work! Would have benefited from a voice-over to enlighten non-experts even more!

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