Int'l Centre for Theoretical Physics 183d ago

Dirac Medallists Shinsei Ryu and Tadashi Takayanagi are interviewed by ICTP Director Atish Dabholkar and by Rosario Fazio, former Head of ICTP’s Condensed Matter and Statistical Physics section. Ryu and Takayanagi were awarded the 2024 Dirac Medal alongside Marina Huerta and Horacio Casini for their insights on quantum entropy in quantum gravity and quantum field theories. In 2006, Ryu and Takayanagi made a ground-breaking proposal that the von Neumann entropy of a gravitational system is given by the area of a minimal area surface in the spacetime geometry. It is related to, but not the same as, the famous Bekenstein-Hawking formula for the entropy of a black hole in terms of the area of its horizon. This proposal, now known as the Ryu-Takayanagi formula, has had many far-reaching implications for elucidating aspects of black holes and holography, where it also led to important applications to strongly interacting systems. Shinsei Ryu is a professor of physics at Princeton University. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the Simons investigator award, Nishina Memorial Prize, and the 2015 New Horizons in Physics Prize. Tadashi Takayanagi is a physics professor at Kyoto University. He has been awarded the Yukawa-Kimura Prize in 2011, the Nishinomiya-Yukawa Memorial Prize in 2013 and the New Horizons in Physics Prize in 2015. 00:07 Introduction 03:15 Motivation for Ryu-Takayanagi formula 08:45 Entanglement Entropy 13:23 Ryu-Takayanagi formula 21:18 Quantum Information and Condensed Matter 24:26 Acceptance of Ryu-Takayanagi formula 29:40 ICTP 30:28 The future of Quantum Gravity 36:58 AdS/CFT and Quantum Computing 40:47 Topological phases of matter 48:03 ICTP and Japan