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Past Events
Joint Colloquium – Department of Physics & Center of Theoretical and Computational Physics:
Many-body Entanglement and Tensor Network States: An Overview
| Speaker: | Prof. Guifre VIDAL |
| Affiliation: | Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada |
| Date: | December 8, 2014 (Mon) |
| Time: | 4:00 p.m. |
| Venue: | Room 522, 5/F, Chong Yuet Ming Physics Building, HKU |
Abstract
Quantum many-body systems are hard to study because the associated Hilbert space, containing all possible many-body states, is huge: its dimension grows exponentially with the system size. In recent years, however, progress in our understanding of quantum entanglement has revealed that a large class of many-body states of interest (including e.g. ground states of local Hamiltonians) are highly atypical; and that their atypical structure allows us to efficiently represent them with a mathematical object called "tensor network". As a result, it is now possible to accurately simulate, say, a quantum spin chain made of thousands of interacting spins. In this talk I will (i) review the computational challenge posed by quantum many-body systems; (ii) summarize our current understanding of many-body entanglement; and (iii) give a gentle introduction to tensor networks as an efficient description of many-body states.
Coffee and tea will be served 20 minutes prior to the colloquium.