1110.4872 (Cédric Bény)

Causal structure of the entanglement renormalization ansatz    [PDF]

Cédric Bény

We show that the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) can be reformulated in terms of a causality constraint on discrete quantum dynamics. This causal structure is that of de Sitter space with a flat spacelike boundary, where the volume of a spacetime region corresponds to the number of variational parameters it contains. This result clarifies the nature of the ansatz, and suggests a generalization to quantum field theory. It also constitutes an independent justification of the connection between MERA and hyperbolic geometry which was proposed as a concrete implementation of the AdS-CFT correspondence.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.4872