18–20 May 2026
James Clerk Maxwell Building
Europe/London timezone

Thermodynamics from Entanglement Entropy

20 May 2026, 10:30
30m
Higgs Centre Seminar Room (4305) (James Clerk Maxwell Building)

Higgs Centre Seminar Room (4305)

James Clerk Maxwell Building

School of Physics and Astronomy University of Edinburgh James Clerk Maxwell Building Peter Guthrie Tait Road Edinburgh EH9 3FD
Abstract for talk

Speaker

Aatu Rajala (University of Helsinki)

Description

Entanglement is a defining property of quantum physics and provides a natural way to characterize correlations. Despite some inherent difficulties, there has been considerable advancement in lattice evaluations of entanglement measures, such as entanglement entropy (EE).

In this talk, I will present our argument that, at large subregions, the derivative of EE with respect to the size of the entangling region equals the thermal entropy density. We provide validation for these claims from our lattice computations in the three-dimensional O(4) model at finite chemical potential by showing that in the corresponding limit, the EE derivative satisfies the same Maxwell relation as the thermal entropy density. These results pave the way for extracting thermodynamics from entanglement data in general QFTs.

Authors

Aatu Rajala (University of Helsinki) Niko Jokela (University of Helsinki) Tobias Rindlisbacher (University of Helsinki)

Presentation materials