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arXiv:1312.3296 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Multiple shocks

Stephen H. Shenker, Douglas Stanford

Published Dec 1, 2014• 478 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Using gauge/gravity duality, we explore a class of states of two CFTs with a large degree of entanglement, but with very weak local two-sided correlation. These states are constructed by perturbing the thermofield double state with thermal-scale operators that are local at different times. Acting on the dual black hole geometry, these perturbations create an intersecting network of shock waves, supporting a very long wormhole. Chaotic CFT dynamics and the associated fast scrambling time play an essential role in determining the qualitative features of the resulting geometries.

DOI
10.1007/jhep12(2014)046

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Using gauge/gravity duality, we explore a class of states of two CFTs with a large degree of entanglement, but with very weak local two-sided correlation. These states are constructed by perturbing the thermofield double state with thermal-scale operators that are local at different times. Acting on the dual black hole geometry, these perturbations create an intersecting network of shock waves, supporting a very long wormhole. Chaotic CFT dynamics and the associated fast scrambling time play an essential role in determining the qualitative features of the resulting geometries.
We calculate the four-wave scattering amplitude in the background of an AdS traversable wormhole in 2+1 dimensions created by a nonlocal coupling of AdS boundaries in the BTZ black hole background. The holographic dual of this setup is a pair of CFTs coupled via a double-trace deformation, the scattering amplitude giving the out-of-time ordered correlator (OTOC) in CFT. Short-living wormholes always exhibit a regime of fast scrambling, saturating the MSS bound for the Lyapunov exponent but in the early-time regime the scrambling can be slower, with a Lyapunov exponent linear in TTT but below the MSS bound. For long-living (near-eternal) wormholes however the numerics suggests the existence of another regime, with a drastic (exponential) slowdown of scrambling and an exponentially small Lyapunov exponent. Our findings have parallels in the SYK model, and may indicate certain limitations of wormhole teleportation protocols previously studied in the literature.
Abstract We analyze the 1+1 CFT states dual to hot (time-symmetric) 2+1 multiboundary AdS wormholes. These are black hole geometries with high local temperature, asymptotically-AdS 3 regions, and arbitrary internal topology. The dual state at t = 0 is defined on n circles. We show these to be well-described by sewing together tensor networks corresponding to thermofield double states. As a result, the entanglement is spatially localized and bipartite: away from particular boundary points (‘vertices’) any small connected region A of the boundary CFT is entangled only with another small connected region B , where B may lie on a different circle or may be a different part of the same circle. We focus on the pair-of-pants case, from which more general cases may be constructed. We also discuss finite-temperature corrections, where we note that the states involve a code subspace in each circle.
We analyze the 1+1 CFT states dual to hot (time-symmetric) 2+1 multiboundary AdS wormholes. These are black hole geometries with high local temperature, -rfnet≥1 asymptotically-AdS3 regions, and arbitrary internal topology. The dual state at t = 0 is defined on n circles. We show these to be well-described by sewing together tensor networks corresponding to thermofield double states. As a result, the entanglement is spatially localized and bipartite: away from particular boundary points (vertices) any small connected region A of the boundary CFT is entangled only with another small connected region B, where B may lie on a different circle or may be a different part of the same circle. We focus on the pair-of-pants case, from which more general cases may be constructed. We also discuss finite-temperature corrections, where we note that the states involve a code subspace in each circle.
We study the mutual information between pairs of regions on the two asymptotic boundaries of maximally extended anisotropic black branes. This quantity characterizes the local pattern of entanglement of the thermofield double states which are dual to these geometries. We analyze the disruption of the mutual information in anisotropic shock wave geometries and show that the entanglement velocity plays an important role in this phenomenon. Moreover, we compute several chaos-related properties of this system, such as the entanglement velocity, the butterfly velocity, and the scrambling time. We find that the butterfly velocity and the entanglement velocity violate the upper bounds proposed in [1-3], but remain bounded by their corresponding values in the infrared effective theory.
We describe a holographic mechanism for black hole formation via the collision of two shock waves in three-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime. In the dual conformal field theory (CFT), a two-shock-wave state corresponds to the insertion of two boosted precursor operators in complementary Rindler patches. Their operator product expansion is initially described by a universal mean-field spectrum of exchanged states, which is dominated by operator dimensions that grow exponentially in the boost parameter. We propose their mean value as diagnosing the mass of the collision product in the bulk. It crosses the CFT heavy state threshold after two scrambling times, in accordance with expectations about black hole formation in general relativity. Our analysis also allows us to identify the scrambling characteristics usually associated with out-of-time-order correlation functions, using only the internal composition of thermal in-time-order correlators.
A standard insight of the AdS/CFT correspondence is that some aspects of the geometry of a bulk state are encoded in the entanglement structure of its dual boundary state. As entanglement is not a linear quantum observable, this means that geometry in a quantum theory of gravity should likewise not be a linear observable. This allows for linear dependencies between states with distinct geometries. We explore linear dependencies between certain states with simple geometric duals: states made up of nnn copies of a thermofield double state and the states obtained from this one by permuting the nnn right hand sides. There are n!n!n! such states, all dual to distinct geometries. We derive expressions for the maximum fidelity between one such state and a linear combination of the others, and see that this fidelity approaches 1 as the number nnn of black holes increases. We also consider the possibility of obtaining a single thermofield double state as the partial trace of a superposition of states whose topology does not connect the two untraced sides. We derive lower bounds for the fidelity between the thermofield double state and such partial traces and comment on the conceptual implications of the existence of such states.