Dmitri E. Kharzeev, Stony Brook University

In this talk, I will advocate the idea that quantum entanglement provides a unifying foundation for both statistical physics and high-energy interactions. I argue that, at sufficiently long times or high energies, most quantum systems approach a Maximal Entanglement Limit (MEL) in which phases of quantum states become unobservable, reduced density matrices acquire a thermal form, and probabilistic descriptions emerge without invoking ergodicity or classical randomness. Within this framework, the emergence of the probabilistic parton model, thermalization in the break-up of confining strings and in high-energy collisions, and the universal small x behavior of structure functions arise as direct consequences of entanglement and geometry of high-dimensional Hilbert space.