UC Berkeley

The eternal quest to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity has recently led to new insights at the interface between gravitational physics, condensed matter, and quantum information science. Much of this progress owes to the development of the holographic principle, a conjectured duality between gravitational systems and ordinary quantum mechanical systems. This opens up the possibility of translating gravitational phenomena into the language of microscopic quantum physics, and vice versa. This thesis explores several surprising connections that have emerged from a sharper understanding of this duality, with a particular emphasis on questions regarding the dynamics of quantum information. What general lessons can we draw from the physics of black holes about the propagation of quantum information in quantum many-body systems? How can we characterize this propagation and leverage it as a resource for performing tasks on large-scale quantum technologies? From a complementary perspective, how can we utilize quantum simulators to probe features of quantum gravity? By investigating these questions, this thesis sheds light on a rich variety of long-standing topics—including quantum chaos, teleportation, and metrology. More broadly, it demonstrates holography as a powerful theoretical framework for guiding our exploration of quantum many-body physics.