The Smallest Interacting Universe
Modjtaba Shokrian Zini, Adam R. Brown, Michael Freedman

TL;DR
This paper proposes a model where the emergence of locality and degrees of freedom in the universe results from minimizing a loss functional, leading to tensor product structures that resemble spontaneous symmetry breaking, with implications for the arrow of time.
Contribution
It introduces a combined loss functional for both the Hamiltonian and initial state, demonstrating how their joint minimization leads to emergent locality and tensor factorizations.
Findings
Tensor product structures emerge from the minimization process.
Locality can arise via a symmetry-breaking mechanism.
The initial state and Hamiltonian become correlated through this process.
Abstract
The co-emergence of locality between the Hamiltonian and initial state of the universe is studied in a simple toy model. We hypothesize a fundamental loss functional for the combined Hamiltonian and quantum state and minimize it by gradient descent. This minimization yields a tensor product structure simultaneously respected by both the Hamiltonian and the state, suggesting that locality can emerge by a process analogous to spontaneous symmetry breaking. We discuss the relevance of this program to the arrow of time problem. In our toy model, we interpret the emergence of a tensor factorization as the appearance of individual degrees of freedom within a previously undifferentiated (raw) Hilbert space. Earlier work [5, 6] looked at the emergence of locality in Hamiltonians only, and found strong numerical confirmation of that raw Hilbert spaces of are unstable and prefer to…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCosmology and Gravitation Theories · Black Holes and Theoretical Physics · Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture
