Quantum Impurity Entanglement

Erik Sorenson
McMaster University

Date: Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Time: 10:30 AM
Location: Stirling 201

Abstract:

A system that can be divided into two parts A and B is said to be entangled if the ground-state wavefunction cannot be written as a product $|A>|B>$. While entanglement is at the foundation of the fields of quantum information/computing it has recently been recognized as a crucial concept for understanding quantum critical phenomena, topological phases and efficient numerical methods as they are used in the field of condensed matter. In this talk I will try to describe some of these recent developments from the point of view of both theory and experiment. In particular, I will focus on entanglement in spin chains and describe recent work showing how impurities become entangled with the bulk spin chain. In some cases a simple intuitive picture can be developed allowing for almost exact variational calculations.

Note: Room change!