Speaker
Gordon Semenoff
(University of British Columbia)
Description
The subtle interplay of infrared singularities in quantum electrodynamics and perturbative quantum gravity and information theoretic issues such as quantum entanglement between soft and hard degrees of freedom will be discussed. It will be argued that the inevitable loss of soft photons and gravitons in a scattering experiment leads to decoherence of the out-going state, that this decoherence persists even when the incoming states are infrared-safe coherent states, and that mathematical issues in scattering theory with normalizable incoming wave packets distinguishes between competing methods and requires infrared-safe in-states.
Primary author
Gordon Semenoff
(University of British Columbia)
