When I receive many notifications of citations of my 1975 paper on the duality condition for quantum fields, I take a look at the new reference. But although I can roughly follow the arguments (having not worked in this field for many decades), I don't have a good sense of the context for all this work on Modular Hamiltonians, Entanglement, Conformal/AdS, etc. Where is this research heading? What large questions are these papers hoping to solve.
Dear Joseph,
I regard your work with Eyvind Wichmann as an important mathematical discovery, whose impact on theoretical and mathematical physics was unfolded only thereafter (in the past almost 50 years) by other researchers. Their results reach from a profound understanding of the 'Unruh effect' over deep insights into the mathematical structure of relativistic quantum field theories (including conformal ones, questions of entanglement etc), up to novel constructive schemes for integrable models.
Your work with Eyvind in relativisti QFT combined elements of complex analysis with the theory of operator algebras. It therebye opened the door to a powerful mathematical tool: modular theory, developped by Tomita and Takesaki; Bochers spoke of the 'modular revolution' in QFT.
So here is my explanation, why your work with Eyvind is still frequently quoted: the mathematical tools which you discovered in connection with the problem of Haag duality in QFT have proved to be useful much more generally. Yet it took some time to uncover that...
Detlev
Nowadays most of the researches are "Applied" research instead of Theoretical. Therefore, output of the researches are helping industries to minimise their cost and do something better. No wonder, most of the research projects are industry funded.
Dear Joseph,
I regard your work with Eyvind Wichmann as an important mathematical discovery, whose impact on theoretical and mathematical physics was unfolded only thereafter (in the past almost 50 years) by other researchers. Their results reach from a profound understanding of the 'Unruh effect' over deep insights into the mathematical structure of relativistic quantum field theories (including conformal ones, questions of entanglement etc), up to novel constructive schemes for integrable models.
Your work with Eyvind in relativisti QFT combined elements of complex analysis with the theory of operator algebras. It therebye opened the door to a powerful mathematical tool: modular theory, developped by Tomita and Takesaki; Bochers spoke of the 'modular revolution' in QFT.
So here is my explanation, why your work with Eyvind is still frequently quoted: the mathematical tools which you discovered in connection with the problem of Haag duality in QFT have proved to be useful much more generally. Yet it took some time to uncover that...
Detlev
Thanks Detlev for the answer. Could you give me some insight specifically why entanglement entropy is such a hot topic in qft and conformal ft?
Dear Joseph,
in essence, you are asking about the reason for fashions in science (I have witnessed quite a few of them). There are many fundamental topics in physics, entropy and entanglement are clearly amongst them. Yet there is also a huge number of others, which, at some instance of time, may receive less attention, but come into focus again, later.
The creation of a fashion requires some novel idea, triggering interest, but - perhaps even more importantly - sufficiently many scholars who already have in their repertoir tools which enable them to make further contributions.
In case of entropy and entanglement, your work with Eyvind touched exactly this particular topic, even though you did not think about it in this way at that time. You were interested in the relation between an algebra and its commutant, who are 'communicating' with each other in a particular state. A modern, state dependent measure for this type of communication is entanglement entropy. It is of interest not only in QFT, but also in quantum information theory etc. Many people, who have studied your works and that of your successors, are equipped with the tools to contribute to this discussion, and that explains the many references to your work.
'Entanglement entropy' is an interesting topic, indeed. But it is perhaps not such an exceedingly hot topic as your original question seemed to suggest.
Best wishes,
Detlev
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Citations