Chris Akers Portrait
Assistant Professor
Physics
chris.akers@colorado.edu

Research interests

I am interested in combining quantum mechanics and gravity, especially by thinking about quantum mechanical aspects of black holes and the AdS/CFT correspondence (our best theory of quantum gravity so far).听

To this end, I often use the tools of quantum information theory and quantum computation, and I am interested in expanding these connections. How can quantum computers be used to help the study of quantum gravity? In what ways does quantum gravitational physics affect the theory of computation?

Selected Publications

  • C. Akers, A. Levine, G. Penington, and E. Wildenhain, One-shot holography, SciPost Phys. 16 (2024), no. 6 144, [arXiv:2307.13032].
  • C. Akers, N. Engelhardt, D. Harlow, G. Penington, and S. Vardhan, The black hole interior from non-isometric codes and complexity, JHEP 06 (2024) 155,
  • [arXiv:2207.06536].
  • C. Akers and G. Penington, Quantum minimal surfaces from quantum error correction, SciPost Phys. 12 (2022), no. 5 157, [arXiv:2109.14618].
  • C. Akers and G. Penington, Leading order corrections to the quantum extremal surface prescription, JHEP 04 (2021) 062, [arXiv:2008.03319].
  • C. Akers and P. Rath, Entanglement Wedge Cross Sections Require Tripartite
  • Entanglement, JHEP 04 (2020) 208, [arXiv:1911.07852].
  • C. Akers and P. Rath, Holographic Renyi Entropy from Quantum Error Correction, JHEP 05 (2019) 052, [arXiv:1811.05171].