Quantum correlations and (emergent) geometry

Fields: quantum gravity, quantum information, many-body physics

The emerging information paradigm has introduced a new operational language into physics. It has not only given rise to quantum information and quantum computation, but also led to a new understanding of quantum theory through various reconstructions. An informational perspective entails a novel perception of spacetime and gravity too: thanks to the intimate relation between information flow and causal structure, a general relativistic spacetime can, in principle, be reduced to the information flow among all degrees of freedom contained in it -- at least up to scale. In line with this, plenty of recent results suggest the emergence of spacetime, including its dynamics, from microscopic constituents to be deeply connected to quantum correlations of the latter. A picture arises that characterizes the architecture of spacetime as a network of quantum degrees of freedom exchanging information. A key advantage of informational ingredients is their quasi-independence of the precise physical incarnation of the underlying degrees of freedom, making them ideal for an approach focusing on universal properties as pursued in our unit.

Ideas along these lines have recently received utmost attention, especially in the context of holographic approaches. Our aim is to generalize various of these ideas on the emergence of geometries from quantum correlations beyond holographic scenarios.