Michael Freedman, Microsoft Station Q

"The Smallest Interacting Universe"

Abstract: I will discuss a recent paper arXiv:2208.00944 , joint with Modj Shokrian Zini and Adam Brown, in which spontaneous symmetry breaking SSB is studied in a novel context representing a tiny toy model for our universe. SSB produces an initial Hamiltonian H_0 and initial state Psi_0, both compatible with an emergent tensor decomposition. In the numerics, we see an unstructured, “naked”, Hilbert space “dress” itself with these interlocking structures. Our study seeks to understand how the most elementary constituents of physics can arise beginning only with a Hilbert space and its group of symmetries.