Skip to main content
March 27, 2023 past

Special Condensed Atomic Molecular Physics (CAMP) Seminar - Xiaoliang Qi, Stanford

339 Davey Lab

Special Condensed Atomic Molecular Physics (CAMP) Seminar - Xiaoliang Qi, Stanford

Title: Spacetime Mutual Information

Abstract: Most quantum information measures are defined for quantum states. For example, mutual information measures the correlation between two subsystems in a quantum state. It is natural to ask whether correlation in spacetime can be characterized by some generalization of mutual information. In this work, we propose a space-time generalization of mutual information. The key idea is to consider a general "quantum experiment" that measures the correlation between two space-time regions, and use the setup of hypothesis testing. We discuss various properties of the spacetime mutual information, including how it provides an upper bound for all connected correlation functions, which is a direct generalization of the similar property of ordinary mutual information.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2023-03-27 10:00 Xiaoliang Qi Spacetime Mutual Information
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.