Spacetime as a quantum many-body system

TL;DR

This paper explores the idea that spacetime and gravity may emerge from quantum many-body systems, highlighting the intersection of quantum gravity with condensed matter physics and discussing relevant examples.

Contribution

It reviews how quantum many-body physics concepts are applied to understand the emergence of spacetime in quantum gravity research.

Findings

Quantum gravity links gravitational physics with quantum many-body systems.

Emergent spacetime concepts are supported by examples from many-body physics.

Methods from quantum many-body physics are central to recent quantum gravity approaches.

Abstract

Quantum gravity has become a fertile interface between gravitational physics and quantum many-body physics, with its double goal of identifying the microscopic constituents of the universe and their fundamental dynamics, and of understanding their collective properties and how spacetime and geometry themselves emerge from them at macroscopic scales. In this brief contribution, we outline the problem of quantum gravity from this emergent spacetime perspective, and discuss some examples in which ideas and methods from quantum many-body systems have found a central role in quantum gravity research.