UNC PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY CHALK TALK
Alex Maloney, McGill University
“Precision Computations in AdS/CFT”
We describe applications of AdS/CFT to three open problems: one in quantum information theory, one in quantum gravity and one in quantum cosmology. In the first application we use AdS/CFT to study entanglement entropies which characterize the degree of spatial entanglement in the ground state of a quantum field theory. We learn that these entropies undergo a novel phase transition, in which non-analytic features of the entanglement spectrum are related to basic CFT quantities. In the second application, we use our knowledge of the classification of CFTs to argue that, in certain solvable models, *any* theory of quantum gravity with a semi-classical limit is necessarily a string theory. Finally, we describe holographic approaches to de Sitter space, where many of the notions developed in Anti-de Sitter space – such as supersymmetry and higher spin symmetry – can be applied to inflationary space-times.