Online Workshop on Quantum Gravity, Holography and Quantum Information

Online Workshop on Quantum Gravity, Holography and Quantum Information

The study of quantum effects on black holes including their gravitational backreaction is an important but notoriously hard problem. I will begin by reviewing how the framework of braneworld holography allows to solve it for strongly-coupled quantum conformal fields. Then I will describe a holographic construction of quantum rotating BTZ black holes (quBTZ) using an exact dual four-dimensional bulk solution. Besides yielding the quantum-corrected geometry and the renormalized stress tensor of quBTZ, we use it to show that the quantum black hole entropy, which includes the entanglement of the fields outside the horizon, rather non-trivially satisfies the first law of thermodynamics, while the Bekenstein-Hawking-Wald entropy does not.

We introduce the concept of saturons, systems that saturate a certain bound on entropy, which is imposed

by S-matrix and unitarity. Such objects share certain niversal properties (e.g., the area-law of entropy, near-thermal emission, inner entanglement, ...) that goes well beyond gravity. We give an example from QCD. We show that black holes and de Sitter are saturons and this determines their physical properties such as their entanglement curves. Both exhibit anomalous quantum break-time which for de Sitter is deadly. Through this mechanism, the S-matrix formulation

of quantum gravity/string theory excludes de Sitter vacua.

I will describe the four-derivative corrections to four-dimensional N=2 minimal gauged supergravity and show that they are controlled by two constants. Interestingly, the solutions of the equations of motion in the two-derivative theory are not modified by the higher-derivative corrections. I will use this to arrive at a general formula for the regularized on-shell action for any asymptotically locally AdS_4 solution of the theory and show how the higher-derivative corrections affect black hole thermodynamic quantities in a universal way. I will employ these results in the context of holography to derive new explicit results for the subleading corrections in the large N expansion of supersymmetric partition functions on various compact manifolds for a large class of three-dimensional SCFTs arising from M2- and M5-branes. I will also briefly discuss possible extensions and generalizations of these results.

Computational complexity is a notion from information theory, initially defined for finite-dimensional systems, measuring the number of gates that have to be applied to a given reference state to reach a target state. Susskind’s proposals for defining computational complexity also for characterising quantum properties black holes have triggered significant interest in defining computational complexity also for quantum field theories, i.e. for infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. The idea is to establish a precise holographic dictionary for complexity. There are successful proposals for complexity definitions in free quantum field theory. Recently, there have been several proposals also for interacting theories, mostly in the context of conformal field theories, building gate sets from symmetry generators. Questions to be discussed include, in addition to further questions about the talks on the subject presented at the workshop: - What is the status of defining complexity for interacting field theories? - How do different proposals for gate sets, reference states and cost functions compare to each other? - What is the status of establishing a holographic dictionary? - What are promising avenues to be pursued for further progress?

The principle of holography of information states that, in any theory of quantum gravity, a copy of all the information available on a Cauchy slice is also available near the boundary of the slice. This principle can be made precise and proved, under weak assumptions, for theories of gravity in AdS and in flat space and it has interesting implications for black holes. In this talk, we will describe how this principle can be tested within the realm of low-energy effective field theory. We will describe how observers placed in a low-energy state near the boundary of AdS can use a simple physical protocol to completely identify the state of the bulk without directly visiting the bulk. We will also describe low-energy thought experiments that can be used to similarly obtain information about the bulk state from near the boundary of flat space.

In this talk we calculate the entanglement entropy in the presence of a moving mirror in a CFT. We employ the AdS/BCFT construction to describe a gravity dual of moving mirrors. We will show that the time evolution of entanglement entropy for a class of moving mirror, which models an evaporating black hole, follows an ideal page curve. In this gravity dual of this model and also in earlier works on holographic page curves, the end of the world-brane in AdS plays a crucial role. I will also present our recent result on their chaotic spectrum in holographic CFTs.

In this talk I will discuss circuit complexity in the setting of higher dimensional conformal field theories. I will consider unitary gates built from a representation of the conformal group, two different circuit cost functions defined using either the Fubini-Study metric or the one-norm, and paths that start from an initial spinless primary state. We will see that the resulting Fubini-Study metric is the metric on a particular coadjoint orbit of the conformal group, while the one-norm computes the geometric action associated to this orbit. This generalizes recent results in 2d connecting the one-norm to a Virasoro geometric action, and also shows that coadjoint orbits provide a unified geometric framework that applies to different choices of cost functions. I will end with some comments about symmetry groups other than the conformal group, using group theoretic generalizations of coherent states. This is based on a work with Nicolas Chagnet, Jan de Boer and Claire Zukowski.

Computational complexity is a quantum information concept that recently has found applications in holography. I will consider quantum computational complexity for n qubits using Nielsen's geometrical approach. In the definition of complexity there is a big amount of arbitrariness due to the choice of the penalty factors, which parameterize the cost of the elementary computational gates. In order to reproduce desired features in holography, negative sectional curvatures are required. With the simplest choice of penalties, this is achieved at the price of singular curvatures in the large n limit. I will consider a choice of penalties in which negative curvatures can be obtained in a smooth way. I will also talk about the relation between operator and state complexities, framing the discussion in the language of Riemannian submersions. Finally, I'll discuss conjugate points for a large number of qubits in the unitary space and I'll provide a strong indication that maximal complexity scales exponentially with the number of qubits in a certain regime of the penalties space.