Joint HEP/CPM Seminar

Entanglement, entropy and quantum error correction

Patrick Hayden

School of Computer Science
McGill University

A search of the cond-mat arXiv reveals hundreds of papers containing “entanglement entropy” in their titles, but what's so special about this recently fashionable function? I'll give a quick introduction to the information theoretic interpretation of entanglement entropy, through its connection to compression and quantum error correction. Time-permitting, I'll describe the special behaviour of entanglement entropy in holographic field theories and what can be learned from it.