Structure of entanglement in many body systems
Another fascinating avenue to explore non-unitary dynamics is by understanding its impact on the phases of many-body systems, such as SYK or CFTs. Generally, coupling such systems to an external reservoir can significantly alter their phase, creating a rich phenomenology that makes this problem particularly intriguing. A straightforward setup to study these effects is a Boundary CFT (BCFT) or an Interface CFT (ICFT), where the boundary or interface is coupled to a reservoir CFT. Conformal boundary conditions represent a phase where the two systems are entangled but do not exchange energy. This setup allows us to address many
interesting scenarios, such as performing a quench on the system and exactly computing the evolution of entanglement. In holographic BCFTs/ICFTs, this is also connected to the black hole information paradox. Additionally, other setups can be explored, such as the relationship between open system dynamics and maximal scrambling, or the interplay between Measurements Induced Phase Transitions (MIPT) and non-unitary dynamics in CFTs.
Holography, black holes and open quantum systems
Recent advancements in understanding the role of wormholes for gravitational systems have illuminated the fact that semiclassical gravity retains informations on universal features of the microscopic theory in an averaged or coarse-grained sense. This proved very fruitful in the study of the quantum chaotic dynamics of black holes, and in understanding their evaporation. Such systems therefore
present themselves as particularly fascinating and unique open systems to study. I am keenly interested in exploring these effects to better understand the connection between semiclassical gravity and this probabilistic interpretation, and to further investigate the characteristics of black holes as open quantum systems.
Research interests
My research lies at the border between high energy physics and condensed matter, in particular between holography, many body physics and non-unitary dynamics. I am mostly interested in the theoretical aspects of these fields, but part of my endeavours are targeted to experimental realisations of holographic theories.
More precisely, my research activity can be divided into three main directions, all interconnected.
Quantum gravity in the lab
I am also part of the HoloGraph consortium, involving UniGE (Sonner’s group), EPFL (Brantut’s group), ETH (Esslinger’s group) and UniTrento (Hauke’s group), and funded by the Swiss Federal Government (SERI). This collaboration aims to realise holographic quantum matter in laboratory experiments. Realizing such systems is quite challenging, given that it involves strongly coupled phases where all constituents interact with an all-to-all random interaction. However, these exotic features give holographic systems intriguing properties, most notably maximal scrambling, the quantum version of the Butterfly Effect that is realised in chaotic systems. My research focuses on the theoretical implementation of these models in cold atom cavities and exploring potential sources of dissipation that might affect these experiments.