HET seminar: Gordon Semenoff

Speaker: Gordon Semenoff

Title: Infrared Quantum Information

Abstract: Central to the solution of the infrared catastrophes of quantum electrodynamics and perturbative quantum gravity is the idea that detection apparratus inevitably have limited resolution and, in any scattering processs, an infinite number of arbitrarily soft photons and gravitons are produced and escape detection. Photons and gravitons have polarizations and momenta and one might suspect that those which escape can carry away a significant amount of information. In this talk, I will examine the question as to the quantity of this information loss, its consequences and suggestions for experimental tests of the theoretical ideas, including whether precision interference experiments could see decoherence due to quantum gravitational effects.