Emergent Geometry in Quantum Graphity

by Prof. Kassa Betre (Pepperdine University)

Thursday Jun 6, 2019, 3:00 PM → 4:00 PM Pacific/Honolulu

112 (Watanabe Hall)

A quantum theory of gravity is necessary in order to understand what happens at spacetime singularities such as black holes and big-bang singularities. It will also explain the origin of the microstates that give rise to black hole entropy. Historically, the main way in which physicists have tried to quantize gravity was by starting with Einstein’s General theory of Relativity and applying quantization procedures. However, so far these efforts have not led to an experimentally testable prediction. Recently there has been growing interest in exploring the possibility that spacetime, and by extension its description in terms of Einstein’s General theory of Relativity may not be fundamental, but rather an emergent phenomenon from fundamentally non-geometric quantum mechanical microscopic theory. In this colloquium, after giving an overview of the main approaches towards quantum gravity, we will focus on “Quantum Graphity” which is a condensed matter approach to explain the geometry of spacetime as an emergent low energy degree of freedom of a fundamentally graph theoretic and non-geometric quantum system.

Video - Prof. K. Betre