New Publication in Physical Review Letters
Recently, mathematical structures called von Neumann algebras have been found to be of importance for describing the quantum properties of black holes. We establish a new bridge between different areas of physics by solving a new interacting model belonging to the areas of statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. This model displays phase transitions between states realizing different types of von Neumann algebras and thus establishes an astonishing parallel to quantum black holes. Moreover, our model allows us to gain insights into entanglement, a type of correlations fundamentally unique to quantum systems. By exactly solving the model, we quantify the entanglement in a general interacting setting, a feature that is only scarcely found in previous literature.
