Abstract: A strange aspect of quantum mechanics is what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”: measuring the spin of one particle of an EPR pair leads to wavefunction collapse that instantaneously changes the correlation between the two particles regardless of how far they are separated. In this talk I will discuss how this effect is generalized to entangled states of many particles. In particular I will show that local measurements of a critical quantum ground state can induce a phase transition that instantaneously modifies the power-law decay of correlations at arbitrary long distances. I will explain how this transition can be analyzed through a mapping to a statistical field theory with boundary criticality and discuss a realistic scheme for observing these phenomena in experiments.  

Research Interests: Condensed matter theory, Quantum Dynamics, Quantum Information