3:30–4:30 pm Maria Goeppert-Mayer Lecture Hall
Emergent Symmetry from Entanglement Suppression
Ian Low, Northwestern University
Symmetry is one of the most fundamental principles in nature, but where does it come from? I will discuss recent efforts to understand the origin of symmetry from the perspective of quantum information. In the scattering of spin-1/2 fermions, the S-matrix can be considered as a quantum logic gate acting on a two-qubit system and realizing a minimally entangling S-matrix in the s-wave scattering leads to emergent global symmetries, as exemplified in Wigner's spin-flavor symmetry and Schrodinger's non-relativistic conformal invariance in nucleon-nucleon scattering. Generalizing to octet baryons transforming under the SU(3) flavor symmetry of QCD, successive entanglement minimization gives rise to increasingly larger emergent symmetries, such as SU(6), SO(8), SU(8), and SU(16). Improved precision from lattice simulations could help determine the amount of emergent symmetries in low-energy QCD.