Theoretical high-energy and condensed-matter physics share various ideas and tools. New connections between the two have been established through quantum information, providing exciting prospects for theoretical advances and even potential experimental studies. Six scientists discuss different directions of research in this inter-disciplinary field.
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Sean Hartnoll is Associate Professor of Physics at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 2005 and did postdocs at Cambridge, KITP Santa Barbara and Harvard. He won the New Horizons prize in 2015. He has co-authored a book on ‘Holographic Quantum Matter’ and works on a range of topics in high energy, gravitational and condensed matter physics.
Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He was educated at the Indian Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. His honours include the Dirac Medal and the Onsager Prize. His research on many-particle quantum entanglement connects to the properties of quantum matter and black holes.
Tadashi Takayanagi received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 2002. He worked in Harvard University and in KITP Santa Barbara as a post-doctoral fellow. He is currently a professor at Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University and has been working on the deep connections between quantum gravity and quantum information, especially from the viewpoint of holography in string theory.
Xie Chen received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012. She was a Miller research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley for two years before joining the faculty of the California Institute of Technology in 2014. Dr Chen is interested in studying non-trivial emergent phenomena in strongly interacting quantum many-body systems, such as topological order, symmetry anomaly, fracton order and others.
Eva Silverstein is Professor of Physics at Stanford University. Much of her research connects the mathematical structure of string theory to predictions for cosmological observables, with broader implications for primordial cosmology. She and her collaborators developed a framework for upgrading the gauge/gravity duality to the realistic case of a positive cosmological constant. At the interface with condensed matter theory, along with other researchers, she derived examples of non-Fermi liquids in theoretically controlled systems.
Julian Sonner received his PhD from the University of Cambridge (UK) where he also held a Research Fellowship at Trinity College. After postdoctoral work in London and Cambridge (USA), he became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Geneva. He works on holographic duality, most recently on the connection between quantum chaos and black holes, as well as quantum simulation of simple holographic dualities.
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Hartnoll, S., Sachdev, S., Takayanagi, T. et al. Quantum connections. Nat Rev Phys 3, 391–393 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-021-00319-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-021-00319-0
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