Science and Technology I, Room 306, 11am (+ lunch after noon)
QOB visitor informal talk
Dr. Noah Bray-Ali, NIST
Holographic Entanglement Spectrum
Topological insulators and topological superconductors are characterized by dimensional reduction: their low energy, compressible excitations live on the boundary. This holography (dimensional reduction) extends to the quantum information content of the ground-state wavefunction. The universal part of the entanglement spectrum (singular value decomposition of the wavefunction) matches the universal part of the energy spectrum for boundary excitations. We present the holographic entanglement spectrum of two-dimensional paired fermion systems with breaking of parity and time-reversal symmetries, as a concrete example, and discuss extensions to other topological states of matter.
Biographical notes: Noah Bray-Ali is a condensed matter theorist working on quantum, many-body physics of strongly correlated electron and atom systems. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2006 for work on the stability of superconductivity and antiferromagnetism to nanoscale inhomogeneity. He held a postdoctoral position at University of Southern California from 2006-2009 applying quantum information ideas to study unconventional superconductors and the Mott metal-insulator transition. From 2009-2010, he was at University of Kentucky studying the effects of inhomogeneity on quantum Hall bilayers. Since August 2010, he has joined the Joint Quantum Institute at National Institute of Standards and Technology-Gaithersburg and University of Maryland, College Park as a National Research Council postdoctoral research associate focusing on topological states of matter in ultra-cold atom systems.