Physicists Have Built a Mathematical ‘Playground’ to Study Quantum Information

(Phys.org) In a new study from Skoltech and the University of Kentucky, researchers have found a new connection between quantum information and quantum field theory. This work attests to the growing role of quantum information theory across various areas of physics.
Quantum information plays an increasingly important role as an organizing principle connecting various branches of physics. In particular, the theory of quantum error correction, which describes how to protect and recover information in quantum computers and other complex interacting systems, has become one of the building blocks of the modern understanding of quantum gravity.
In a rather unexpected twist, scientists realized not too long ago that quantum gravity—the theory describing quantum dynamics of space and time—operates similar mathematical protocols to exchange information between different parts of space. “The locality of information within quantum gravity remains one of the few open fundamental problems in theoretical physics. That is why the appearance of well-studied mathematical structures such as quantum error correcting codes is intriguing,” Dymarsky notes. “”Now we have a new playground to study the role of quantum error correcting codes in the context of quantum field theory.”