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arXiv:1411.7041 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Bulk locality and quantum error correction in AdS/CFT

Ahmed Almheiri, Xi Dong, Daniel Harlow

Published Apr 1, 2015• 802 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We point out a connection between the emergence of bulk locality in AdS/CFT and the theory of quantum error correction. Bulk notions such as Bogoliubov transformations, location in the radial direction, and the holographic entropy bound all have natural CFT interpretations in the language of quantum error correction. We also show that the question of whether bulk operator reconstruction works only in the causal wedge or all the way to the extremal surface is related to the question of whether or not the quantum error correcting code realized by AdS/CFT is also a “quantum secret sharing scheme”, and suggest a tensor network calculation that may settle the issue. Interestingly, the version of quantum error correction which is best suited to our analysis is the somewhat nonstandard “operator algebra quantum error correction” of Beny, Kempf, and Kribs. Our proposal gives a precise formulation of the idea of “subregion-subregion” duality in AdS/CFT, and clarifies the limits of its validity.

DOI
10.1007/jhep04(2015)163

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We point out a connection between the emergence of bulk locality in AdS/CFT and the theory of quantum error correction. Bulk notions such as Bogoliubov transformations, location in the radial direction, and the holographic entropy bound all have natural CFT interpretations in the language of quantum error correction. We also show that the question of whether bulk operator reconstruction works only in the causal wedge or all the way to the extremal surface is related to the question of whether or not the quantum error correcting code realized by AdS/CFT is also a “quantum secret sharing scheme”, and suggest a tensor network calculation that may settle the issue. Interestingly, the version of quantum error correction which is best suited to our analysis is the somewhat nonstandard “operator algebra quantum error correction” of Beny, Kempf, and Kribs. Our proposal gives a precise formulation of the idea of “subregion-subregion” duality in AdS/CFT, and clarifies the limits of its validity.
Bulk reconstruction is a central problem in AdS/CFT, and entanglement wedge reconstruction is its subregion version. We argue that this subregion statement should be separated from the stronger holographic quantum error correction interpretation, in which one region-independent logical bulk operator has code-preserving representatives in several boundary regions. A simple locality argument shows that such a common reconstruction must commute with the code-preserving local algebras in the complementary regions. This is the mechanism realized in HaPPY-type codes: the erased regions are blind to a protected logical algebra. An ordinary finite NNN holographic CFT does not have such a protected invisible sector for supergravity fields. Its low-energy local observables, in particular, suitably smeared stress tensors, detect the physical support and gravitational dressing of ordinary bulk operators, up to possible center or superselection data. Thus, there is no such holographic quantum error correction and the N=∞N=\inftyN=∞ agreement of global and subregion HKLL formulae is a free-theory statement. What remains is entanglement wedge reconstruction without holographic quantum error correction, or subregion complementarity: each boundary region has its own code-preserving low-energy algebra and its own region-adapted bulk interpretation, rather than a shared logical operator.
In the context of quantum theories of spacetime, one overarching question is how quantum information in the bulk spacetime is encoded holographically in boundary degrees of freedom.It is particularly interesting to understand the correspondence between bulk subregions and boundary subregions in order to address the emergence of locality in the bulk quantum spacetime.For the AdS/CFT correspondence, it is known that this bulk information is encoded redundantly on the boundary in the form of an error-correcting code.Having access only to a subregion of the boundary is as if part of the holographic code has been damaged by noise and rendered inaccessible.In quantum-information science, the problem of recovering information from a damaged code is addressed by the theory of universal recovery channels.We apply and extend this theory to address the problem of relating bulk and boundary subregions in AdS/CFT, focusing on a conjecture known as entanglement wedge reconstruction.Existing work relies on the exact equivalence between bulk and boundary relative entropies, but these are only approximately equal in bulk effective field theory, and in similar situations it is known that predictions from exact entropic equalities can be qualitatively incorrect.We show that the framework of universal recovery channels provides a robust demonstration of the entanglement wedge reconstruction conjecture as well as new physical insights.Most notably, we find that a bulk operator acting in a given boundary region's entanglement wedge can be expressed as the response of the boundary region's modular Hamiltonian to a perturbation of the bulk state in the direction of the bulk operator.This formula can be interpreted as a noncommutative version of Bayes's rule that attempts to undo the noise induced by restricting to only a portion of the boundary.To reach these conclusions, we extend the theory of universal recovery channels to finite-dimensional operator algebras and demonstrate that recovery channels approximately preserve the multiplicative structure of the operator algebra.
In this note we prove a simple theorem in quantum information theory, which implies that bulk operators in the Anti-de Sitter / Conformal Field Theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence can be reconstructed as CFT operators in a spatial subregion AAA, provided that they lie in its entanglement wedge. This is an improvement on existing reconstruction methods, which have at most succeeded in the smaller causal wedge. The proof is a combination of the recent work of Jafferis, Lewkowycz, Maldacena, and Suh on the quantum relative entropy of a CFT subregion with earlier ideas interpreting the correspondence as a quantum error correcting code.
In this Letter we prove a simple theorem in quantum information theory, which implies that bulk operators in the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence can be reconstructed as CFT operators in a spatial subregion A, provided that they lie in its entanglement wedge. This is an improvement on existing reconstruction methods, which have at most succeeded in the smaller causal wedge. The proof is a combination of the recent work of Jafferis, Lewkowycz, Maldacena, and Suh on the quantum relative entropy of a CFT subregion with earlier ideas interpreting the correspondence as a quantum error correcting code.
Abstract We first show that a class of operators acting on a given bipartite pure state on ℋ A ⊗ ℋ B can shrink its supports on ℋ A ⊗ ℋ B to only ℋ A or ℋ B while keeping its mappings. Using this result, we show how to systematically construct the decoders of the quantum error-correcting codes against erasure errors. The implications of the results for the operator dictionary in the AdS/CFT correspondence are also discussed. The “sub- algebra code with complementary recovery” introduced in the recent work of Harlow is a quantum error-correcting code that shares many common features with the AdS/CFT correspondence. We consider it under the restriction of the bulk (logical) Hilbert space to a subspace that generally has no tensor factorization into subsystems. In this code, the central operators of the reconstructed algebra on the boundary subregion can emerge as a consequence of the restriction of the bulk Hilbert space. Finally, we show a theorem in this code which implies the validity of not only the entanglement wedge reconstruction but also its converse statement with the central operators.
Abstract When the bulk geometry in AdS/CFT contains a black hole, boundary subregions may be sufficient to reconstruct certain bulk operators if and only if the black hole microstate is known, an example of state dependence. Reconstructions exist for any microstate, but no reconstruction works for all microstates. We refine this dichotomy, demonstrating that the same boundary operator can often be used for large subspaces of black hole microstates, corresponding to a constant fraction α of the black hole entropy. In the Schrödinger picture, the boundary subregion encodes the α-bits (a concept from quantum information) of a bulk region containing the black hole and bounded by extremal surfaces. These results have important consequences for the structure of AdS/CFT and for quantum information. Firstly, they imply that the bulk reconstruction is necessarily only approximate and allow us to place non-perturbative lower bounds on the error when doing so. Second, they provide a simple and tractable limit in which the entanglement wedge is state dependent, but in a highly controlled way. Although the state dependence of operators comes from ordinary quantum error correction, there are clear connections to the Papadodimas-Raju proposal for understanding operators behind black hole horizons. In tensor network toy models of AdS/CFT, we see how state dependence arises from the bulk operator being ‘pushed’ through the black hole itself. Finally, we show that black holes provide the first ‘explicit’ examples of capacity-achieving α-bit codes. Unintuitively, Hawking radiation always reveals the α-bits of a black hole as soon as possible. In an appendix, we apply a result from the quantum information literature to prove that entanglement wedge reconstruction can be made exact to all orders in 1/N.