Samuel Leutheusser (Princeton University)

"Implications of the additivity anomaly in large N field theories for holography"

Abstract: Holographic conformal field theories exhibit dramatic changes in the structure of their operator algebras in the limit where the number of local degrees of freedom (N) becomes infinite. An important example of such phenomena is the violation of the additivity property for algebras associated to local subregions. We investigate the consequences of this "additivity anomaly" in the context of holographic duality. We propose that the difference in volumes of bulk dual subregions can be used as a holographic measure for this additivity anomaly of large N boundary algebras. We demonstrate how the additivity anomaly underlies the success of quantum error correcting code models of holography. Finally, we argue that the connected wedge theorems (CWTs) of May, Penington, Sorce, and Yoshida can be re-phrased in terms of the additivity anomaly, allowing for the definition of a generalized scattering region for which a generalization of the CWTs can be formulated such that both the theorem and its converse should hold.

Bio: Sam Leutheusser is a postdoctoral associate research scholar in the Princeton Gravity Initiative at Princeton University. His research focusses on understanding aspects of quantum gravity and quantum field theory using techniques from quantum information theory and the theory of operator algebras. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from MIT, and B.Sc. in Chemical Physics from the University of British Columbia.