Math Graduate Student Seminar

The latest developments in quantum gravity have shown that the emergence of semiclassical spacetime is best described in the language of quantum error correction, especially in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. It has recently been realized that the right framework to describe this idea for physically realistic theories is operator-algebraic, and relies on foundational results in the theory of von Neumann algebras. In this talk, I will give an overview of these recent advances, and show how operator algebraic concepts encode a spectacular amount of information about the geometry of emergent spacetime and its matter content.