dc.description.abstract
The AdS/CFT correspondence, a remarkable duality between certain gravitational theories in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime and quantum field theories with conformal symmetry (CFT), has had a profound effect on the development of theoretical physics in the past two decades.
Recently, many connections of AdS/CFT to quantum information theory have been found, in particular by providing gravitationally dual descriptions of various entanglement measures. Understanding these manifestions of AdS/CFT --- or more generally, the conjectured holographic principle encompassing it --- requires the combination of tools from both high-energy theory and quantum information physics.
In this cumulative thesis, the convergence between these two fields is approached from two fronts:
First, by calculations within the dual gravitational theory, and second, using a tensor network ansatz to describe the quantum states suspected to possess such a gravitational description.
In the first approach, using the gravitational side of AdS/CFT, entanglement entropies of complicated 2+1-dimensional excited CFTs are computed, thus showing how the holographic approach provides access to systems previously out of reach of practical methods, while introducing new numerical methods that this approach necessitates.
The second approach is given by tensor networks, a highly successful ansatz for computing properties of one- and two-dimensional quantum systems.
Efficiently computable classes of tensor networks are tested in their ability to represent simple holographic systems, successfully reproducing both hyperbolic geometrical features as well as critical boundary states.
In addition, the general properties of tensor networks on regular hyperbolic tesselations are considered, leading to new connections to models not previously considered in the context of holography.
This interplay of different approaches to quantum information holography showcases the richness of this new field and suggests that a wide range of physical phenomena is accessible via the new tools now at our disposal.
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