Berry phases, wormholes and factorization in AdS/CFT

Abstract
Within the AdS/CFT correspondence, the entanglement properties of the CFT are related to wormholes in the dual gravity theory. This gives rise to questions about the factorisation properties of the Hilbert spaces on both sides of the correspondence. We review these issues and show how the Berry phase, a geometrical phase encoding information about topology, may be used to reveal similarities between the Hilbert space structure on both sides of the correspondence. Mathematical concepts such as coadjoint orbits play an important role. In addition to its relevance for quantum gravity, this analysis also suggests how to experimentally realise the Berry phase and its relation to entanglement in table-top experiments involving photons or electrons. This provides a new example for relations between very different branches of physics that follow from the AdS/CFT correspondence and its generalisations.

BIO
Johanna Erdmenger is Chair for Theoretical Physics at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg. After obtaining her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1996, she worked as postdoc at the University of Leipzig and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was then junior research group leader at the Humboldt University in Berlin for four years, and afterwards research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich and honorary Professor at LMU in Munich from 2005 until 2016, when she moved to Würzburg for a full professorship. Her research in string theory and quantum field theory is centered on the gauge theory/string theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence, both in its foundational aspects (conformal field theory, quantum information and black holes, higher spin duality) and in a variety of applications to particle physics, condensed matter physics and cosmology.