Quantum Matter

Recent years have seen a renewed interest, both theoretically and experimentally, in the search for topological states of matter. On the theoretical side, while much progress has been achieved in providing a general classification of non-interacting topological states, the fate of these phases in the presence of strong interactions remains an open question. The purpose of this talk is to describe recent developments on this front.

The multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz can be reformulated in terms of a causality constraint on discrete quantum dynamics. This causal structure is that of de Sitter space with a flat spacelike boundary, where the volume of a spacetime region corresponds to the number of variational parameters it contains.

Many-body entanglement, the special quantum correlation that exists among a large number of quantum particles, underlies interesting topics in both condensed matter and quantum information theory. On the one hand, many-body entanglement is essential for the existence of topological order in condensed matter systems and understanding many-body entanglement provides a promising approach to understand in general what topological orders exist.

Topology has many different manifestations in condensed matter physics. Real space examples include topological defects such as vortices, while momentum space ones include topological band structures and singularities in the electronic dispersion. In this talk, I will focus on two examples. The first is that of a vortex in a topological insulator that is doped into the superconducting state. This system, we find, has Majorana zero modes and thus, is a particularly simple way of obtaining these states.