Jutho Haegeman - ERQUAF

Onderstaande beschrijving is in het Engels:

Jutho Haegeman was born in Zottegem, Belgium, in 1984. He received a degree in "Engineering Physics” and in “Physics and Astronomy” from Ghent University in 2007, and a PhD in Physics from the same university in 2011. After a PostDoc in the group of Frank Verstraete at Vienna University, he returned to Ghent, but also enjoyed research stays at RWTH Aachen and at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkely. He furthermore holds a Visiting Research Fellowship at Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada since 2014 and started as a research professor at Ghent University in February 2017.

The research of Jutho Haegeman is focused on strongly correlated quantum many body systems and quantum field theories, with a particular interest in studying these systems using entanglement methods and tensor network states. The latter constitutes both a theoretical framework and a numerical simulation tool to probe the low energy behavior of correlated quantum systems and the exotic phenomenology that can emerge from them.

Contact: Jutho.Haegeman@UGent.be

Publications: https://biblio.ugent.be/person/802000026611

Entanglement and Renormalisation for Quantum Fields (ERQUAF)

Over the past fifteen years, the paradigm of quantum entanglement has revolutionised the understanding of strongly correlated lattice systems. Entanglement and closely related concepts originating from quantum information theory are optimally suited for quantifying and characterising quantum correlations and have therefore proven instrumental for the classification of the exotic phases discovered in condensed quantum matter. One groundbreaking development originating from this research is a novel class of variational many body wave functions known as tensor network states. Their explicit local structure and unique entanglement features make them very flexible and extremely powerful both as a numerical simulation method and as a theoretical tool.

The ERC project ERQUAF sets as its goal to lift this “entanglement methodology” into the realm of quantum field theory. Indeed, in high energy physics, the widespread interest in entanglement has only been triggered recently, due to the intriguing connections between entanglement and the structure of spacetime that arise in black hole physics and quantum gravity. Furthermore, direct continuum limits of various tensor network ansätze have been formulated over the past few years. However, the application thereof to interacting field theories is largely unexplored territory and holds promising potential.

The central theme of ERQUAF is thus to establish the synergy between field theory and entanglement theory via the following goals:
- Characterising the entanglement structure of low energy quantum field states
- Developing variational simulation methods for field theories by combining ideas from entanglement, the renormalisation group and perturbation theory
- Constructing low-energy effective theories on top of the tensor network description of correlated ground states
- Establishing the profound interplay between entanglement, renormalisation and geometry.