On the quantum mechanics of entropic forcesConfirmed

by Manthos Karydas (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Thursday Apr 10, 2025, 2:30 p.m. → 4:00 p.m. America/Toronto

PI/4-405 - Bob Room (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics)

It has been conjectured that the gravitational interaction may arise as an entropic force rather than as a result of virtual quanta exchange of a fundamental field. In this talk I will present a set of microscopic quantum models which realize this idea in detail. I will describe a simple mechanism by which Newton’s law of gravity arises from the extremization of the free energy of a collection of qubits. I will show both a local and non-local model version of the construction and discuss how to distinguish these entropic models from ordinary perturbative quantum gravity using existing observations and near term experiments. Based on 2502.17575 with Daniel Carney, Thilo Scharnhorst, Roshni Singh and Jacob M. Taylor.