Theory Seminar - Allen Liu

— 11:30am

Location:
In Person - Gates Hillman 81092

Speaker:
ALLEN LIU, Ph.D. Student, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://aliu42.github.io/

Entanglement is the quintessential property that distinguishes quantum systems from classical ones. Yet, entanglement remains a mysterious phenomenon, especially in large many-body quantum systems.  In this talk, we aim to understand at what temperatures can quantum systems exhibit entanglement. We show that Gibbs states of local Hamiltonians are unentangled above a critical constant temperature, depending only on the geometry of the Hamiltonian, independent of the system size. This implies a surprising, universal law, that there is a sudden death of quantum entanglement, and upends conventional wisdom about the presence of short-range quantum correlations in Gibbs states.  Our result stems from an algorithmic framework that also gives us an efficient, almost classical algorithm for preparing the Gibbs state above a critical temperature. 

— 

Allen Liu is currently a graduate student in EECS at MIT where he is in his fifth year, working under the wonderful supervision of Ankur Moitra. He also completed his undergraduate degree (in mathematics) at MIT. He is generally interested in algorithms and learning theory, focusing on developing algorithms for machine learning with provable guarantees. He is also interested in applying tools from learning theory to understand problems in quantum information. HIs work is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a Hertz Fellowship, and a Citadel GQS Fellowship.

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