We construct and count the microstates of out-of-equilibrium eternal AdS black holes in which a shell carrying an order one fraction of the black hole mass is emitted from the past horizon and re-absorbed at the future horizon. Our microstates have semiclassical interpretations in terms of matter propagating behind the horizon. We show that they span a Hilbert space with a dimension equal to the exponential of the horizon area of the intermediate black hole. This is consistent with the idea that, in a non-equilibrium setting, entropy is the logarithm of the number of microscopic configurations consistent with the dynamical macroscopic state. In our case, therefore, the entropy should measure the number of microstates consistent with a large and atypical macroscopic black hole fluctuation due to which part of the early time state becomes fully known to an external observer.

United States

Belgium

United Kingdom

Vijay Balasubramanian

Ben Craps

Juan Hernandez

Mikhail Khramtsov

Maria Knysh

Counting microstates of out-of-equilibrium black hole fluctuations

Within the AdS/CFT correspondence, computational complexity for reduced density matrices of holographic conformal field theories has been conjectured to be related to certain geometric observables in the dual gravity theory. We study this conjecture from both the gravity and field theory point of view. Specifically, we consider a measure of complexity associated to the Bures metric on the space of density matrices. We compute this complexity measure for mixed states associated to single intervals in descendant states of the vacuum in 2d CFTs. Moreover, we derive from first principles a geometric observable dual to the Bures metric which is localized in the entanglement wedge of the AdS spacetime associated to the quantum circuit on the boundary. Finally, we compare the Bures metric complexity measure with holographic subregion complexity within the “complexity=volume” paradigm for perturbatively small transformations of the vacuum. While there is no exact agreement between these two quantities, we find striking similarities as we vary the target state and interval size, suggesting that these quantities are closely related.

Marius Gerbershagen

Holographic dual of Bures metric and subregion complexity

We generalize recent results in two-dimensional Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity to study factorization of the Hilbert space of eternal black holes in quantum gravity with a negative cosmological constant in any dimension. We approach the problem by computing the trace of two-sided observables as a sum over a recently constructed family of semiclassically well-controlled black hole microstates. These microstates, which contain heavy matter shells behind the horizon and form an overcomplete basis of the Hilbert space, exist in any theory of gravity with general relativity as its low energy limit. Using this representation of the microstates, we show that the trace of operators dual to functions of the Hamiltonians of the left and right holographic CFTs factorizes into a product over left and right factors to leading order in the semiclassical limit. Under certain conditions this implies factorization of the Hilbert space.

Factorization of the Hilbert space of eternal black holes in general relativity

We explore the complexity equals volume proposal for planar black holes in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime in 2+1 dimensions, with an end of the world (ETW) brane behind the horizon. We allow for the possibility of intrinsic gravitational dynamics in the form of Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity to be localized on the brane. We compute the asymptotic rate of change of volume complexity analytically and obtain the full time dependence using numerical techniques. We find that the inclusion of JT gravity on the brane leads to interesting effects on time dependence of holographic complexity. We identify the region in parameter space (the brane location and the JT coupling) for which the rate of change of complexity violates the Lloyd bound. In an equivalent description of the model in terms of an asymptotically AdS wormhole, we connect the violation of the Lloyd bound to the violation of a suitable energy condition in the bulk that we introduce. We also compare the Lloyd bound constraints to previously derived constraints on the bulk parameters in this model that are based on bounds on entanglement growth in the dual CFT state.

Sergio Aguilar-Gutierrez

France

Ashish Shukla

Holographic complexity: braneworld gravity versus the Lloyd bound

We revisit the model of an AdS2 black hole in JT gravity evaporating into an external bath. We study when, and how much, information about the black hole interior can be accessed through different portions of the Hawking radiation collected in the bath, and we obtain the corresponding full quantitative Page curves. As a refinement of previous results, we describe the island phase transition for a semi-infinite segment of radiation in the bath, establishing access to the interior for times within the regime of applicability of the model. For finite-size segments in the bath, one needs to include the purifier of the black hole microscopic dual together with the radiation segment in order to access the interior information. We identify four scenarios of the entropy evolution in this case, including a possibility where the interior reconstruction window is temporarily interrupted. Analyzing the phase structure of the Page curve of a finite segment with length comparable to the Page time, we demonstrate that it is very sensitive to changes of the parameters of the model. We also discuss the evolution of the subregion complexity of the radiation during the black hole evaporation.

Delicate windows into evaporating black holes

We study two-dimensional eternal black holes with non-zero mass, where each asymptotic boundary is in contact with a CFT on a circle, following the doubly holographic braneworld models constructed in [1–3]. We compute the Page curve of the black hole (or the bath CFTs), which amounts to finding different geodesics in the bulk BTZ geometry with a Randall-Sundrum brane falling into the black hole. We also explore the possibility of including an intrinsic JT gravity action on the brane. As expected, the generalized entropy rises linearly at early times. However, there is a transition to a late-time phase in which the entropy remains constant. The value of the late-time entropy depends on the size of the thermal baths. For a small size, it corresponds to the thermal entropy of the baths, while for large size, it corresponds to twice the horizon entropy of the black hole. The critical size and the Page time are proportional to ratio of the central charges of the conformal defect and the bath CFT.

Canada

Guglielmo Grimaldi

Robert Myers

Quantum extremal islands made easy. Part IV. Massive black holes on the brane

We construct the general hydrodynamic description of (3+1)-dimensional chiral charged (quantum) fluids subject to a strong external magnetic field with effective field theory methods. We determine the constitutive equations for the energy-momentum tensor and the axial charge current, in part from a generating functional. Furthermore, we derive the Kubo formulas which relate two-point functions of the energy-momentum tensor and charge current to 27 transport coefficients: 8 independent thermodynamic, 4 independent non-dissipative hydrodynamic, and 10 independent dissipative hydrodynamic transport coefficients. Five Onsager relations render 5 more transport coefficients dependent. We uncover four novel transport effects, which are encoded in what we call the shear-induced conductivity, the two expansion-induced longitudinal conductivities and the shear-induced Hall conductivity. Remarkably, the shear-induced Hall conductivity constitutes a novel non-dissipative transport effect. As a demonstration, we compute all transport coefficients explicitly in a strongly coupled quantum fluid via holography.

Germany

Martin Ammon

Austria

Spain

Sebastian Grieninger

Matthias Kaminski

Roshan Koirala

Julian Leiber

Jackson Wu

Chiral hydrodynamics in strong external magnetic fields

We examine holographic complexity in the doubly holographic model introduced in [1, 2] to study quantum extremal islands. We focus on the holographic complexity=volume (CV) proposal for boundary subregions in the island phase. Exploiting the Fefferman-Graham expansion of the metric and other geometric quantities near the brane, we derive the leading contributions to the complexity and interpret these in terms of the generalized volume of the island derived from the induced higher-curvature gravity action on the brane. Motivated by these results, we propose a generalization of the CV proposal for higher curvature theories of gravity. Further, we provide two consistency checks of our proposal by studying Gauss-Bonnet gravity and f(ℛ) gravity in the bulk.

Shan-Ming Ruan

Quantum extremal islands made easy. Part III. Complexity on the brane

We study the doubly holographic model of [1] in the situation where a black hole in two-dimensional JT gravity theory is coupled to an auxiliary bath system at arbitrary finite temperature. Depending on the initial temperature of the black hole relative to the bath temperature, the black hole can lose mass by emitting Hawking radiation, stay in equilibrium with the bath or gain mass by absorbing thermal radiation from the bath. In all of these scenarios, a unitary Page curve is obtained by applying the usual prescription for holographic entanglement entropy and identifying the quantum extremal surface for the generalized entropy, using both analytical and numeric calculations. As the application of the entanglement wedge reconstruction, we further investigate the reconstruction of the black hole interior from a subsystem containing the Hawking radiation. We examine the roles of the Hawking radiation and also the purification of the thermal bath in this reconstruction.

Hong Chen

Zachary Fisher

Evaporating black holes coupled to a thermal bath

Recently, new holographic models of black hole evaporation have given fresh insights into the information paradox [1–3]. In these models, the black hole evaporates into an auxiliary bath space after a quantum quench, wherein the holographic theory and the bath are joined. One particularly exciting development is the appearance of ‘ER=EPR’-like wormholes in the (doubly) holographic model of [3]. At late times, the entanglement wedge of the bath includes the interior of the black hole. In this paper, we employ both numerical and analytic methods to study how information about the black hole interior is encoded in the Hawking radiation. In particular, we systematically excise intervals from the bath from the system and study the corresponding Page transition. Repeating this process ad infinitum, we end up with a fractal structure on which the black hole interior is encoded, implementing the überholography protocol of [4].