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SUPA and Heriot-Watt University have a pleasure to invite to a guest lecture "Macroscopic entanglement, critical temperature and phase transitions" by Janet Anders from UCL on the 7th December 2007 at 1 p.m. The lecture will be available in local SUPA rooms.

The talk will cover the entanglement properties of thermal equilibrium states of many-body systems, in particular harmonic lattices and quantum fields. The entanglement exists on the macroscopic scale and how it can be detected using thermodynamic quantities such as energy and temperature. For the harmonic lattice three different methods are presented that classify the different "phases" of entanglement. In the case of the Bosonic gas, the notion of entanglement between regions in space is introduced and the critical temperature for this entanglement is linked to the critical temperature for the occurrence of Bose-Einstein condensation in three dimensions. Finally, A simple experiment how to extract this spatial entanglement will be shown and some speculations about implications of the presented ideas will be presented.