RQI Seminar | Joshua Jones, Spacetime Entropy of Free Fields, Black Holes, and Fundamental Discreteness

About the speaker: Joshua is a PhD student visiting us from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), where he is working under the supervision of Dr. Yasaman Yazdi. Prior to this, Joshua was at Imperial College London, where he first began to work on notions of entropy within the causal set theory approach to quantum gravity.

Abstract: Motivated by the frame independence of the Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy, and the possibility of it being fundamentally entanglement entropy, I will present a spacetime definition for the entanglement entropy of free quantum fields. This definition is a spectral formulation, conducive to frame independent regularization, and applicable to spacetimes with fundamental discreteness. I will then go on to show some example calculations in Rindler spacetime and discuss other applications.

Note: Please join us fifteen minutes early (at 11:00 am) for coffee and snacks, generously funded by the Department of Applied Mathematics.