Zenith Grant Awardee

Patrick Hayden

Stanford University

Co-Investigators

Alexander Maloney, McGill University

Project Title

Entanglement, Monogamy and Holography

Project Summary

One of the most basic and important properties of quantum information is that it cannot be copied. This is known variously as the no-cloning theorem or the monogamy of entanglement. Monogamy is the source of many insights into the nature of correlations in quantum mechanics and, at the same time, some of our most vexing confusion. For example, it is at the core of the notorious firewall argument, which suggests that an observer falling into an old black hole would be destroyed at the event horizon in catastrophic contradiction with general relativity. Meanwhile, the holographic principle, which asserts that a complete description of any volume of space is always subtly encoded onto its surface, forces all correlations to behave monogamously, a tantalizing hint suggesting the correlations\' origins in entanglement. This project will explore the interplay between monogamy and entanglement with the objective of answering the fundamental question of precisely how quantum information can be distributed in space and time. Along the way, we will explore how holography is realized from entanglement and we will explore the power of a quantum computer operating in curved and gravitating spacetimes.

Technical Abstract

One of the most basic and important properties of quantum information is that it cannot be copied. This is known variously as the no-cloning theorem or the monogamy of entanglement. Monogamy is the source of many insights into the nature of correlations in quantum mechanics and, at the same time, some of our most vexing confusion. For example, it is at the core of the notorious firewall argument, which suggests that an observer falling into an old black hole would be destroyed at the event horizon in violent contradiction with general relativity. Monogamy is, likewise, a property of all correlations in holographic field theories, a tantalizing hint about the correlations\' origins in entanglement. We propose to explore the interplay between monogamy and entanglement with the objective of answering the fundamental question of precisely how quantum information can be distributed in space and time. Along the way, we will give new criteria for when quantum field theories can have holographic duals, and we will place new limits on information processing in gravitating systems. These projects will combine in equal and essential measure both basic physics like the AdS/CFT correspondence and insights from quantum information like the theory of quantum error correction.