Graduate Student Seminar | Kelly Wurtz, Correlations and Entanglement in Conformal Field Theory

Friday, July 24, 2026 10:00 am - 11:00 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Location

MC 6460

Candidate

Kelly Wurtz | University of Waterloo

Title

Correlations and Entanglement in Conformal Field Theory

Abstract

Conformal field theories are a broad class of scale-invariant models whose correlation functions are strongly constrained by symmetry. In this talk, I will study how the structure of these correlations is reflected in the interaction of two localized probes coupled to scalar primary operators in a general (d)-dimensional conformal field theory. We show that both the entanglement and mutual information generated between the probes are strongly suppressed as the operator scaling dimension increases, as a consequence of the faster decay of the corresponding two-point function. In theories admitting a holographic description, the associated higher-dimensional model also provides a natural way to distinguish correlations originating in the field from those produced by causal communication between the probes.