Recently, Almheiri, Dong, and Harlow have argued that the localization of bulk information in a boundary dual should be understood in terms of quantum error correction. We show that this structure appears naturally when the gauge invariance of the boundary theory is incorporated. This provides a new understanding of the nonuniqueness of the bulk fields (precursors). It suggests a close connection between gauge invariance and the emergence of spacetime.
Recently, Almheiri, Dong, and Harlow have argued that the localization of bulk information in a boundary dual should be understood in terms of quantum error correction. We show that this structure appears naturally when the gauge invariance of the boundary theory is incorporated. This provides a new understanding of the nonuniqueness of the bulk fields (precursors). It suggests a close connection between gauge invariance and the emergence of spacetime.
Tensor networks implementing quantum error correcting codes have recently been used to construct toy models of holographic duality explicitly realizing some of the more puzzling features of the AdS/CFT correspondence. These models reproduce the Ryu-Takayanagi entropy formula for boundary intervals, and allow bulk operators to be mapped to the boundary in a redundant fashion. These exactly solvable, explicit models have provided valuable insight but nonetheless suffer from many deficiencies, some of which we attempt to address in this article. We propose a new class of tensor network models that subsume the earlier advances and, in addition, incorporate additional features of holographic duality, including: (1) a holographic interpretation of all boundary states, not just those in a “code” subspace, (2) a set of bulk states playing the role of “classical geometries” which reproduce the Ryu-Takayanagi formula for boundary intervals, (3) a bulk gauge symmetry analogous to diffeomorphism invariance in gravitational theories, (4) emergent bulk locality for sufficiently sparse excitations, and (5) the ability to describe geometry at sub-AdS resolutions or even flat space.
Abstract This article reviews the progress in our understanding of the reconstruction of the bulk spacetime in the holographic correspondence from the dual field theory including an account of how these developments have led to the reproduction of the Page curve of the Hawking radiation from black holes. We review quantum error correction and relevant recovery maps with toy examples based on tensor networks, and discuss how it provides the desired framework for bulk reconstruction in which apparent inconsistencies with properties of the operator algebra in the dual field theory are naturally resolved. The importance of understanding the modular flow in the dual field theory has been emphasized. We discuss how the state-dependence of reconstruction of black hole microstates can be formulated in the framework of quantum error correction with inputs from extremal surfaces along with a quantification of the complexity of encoding of bulk operators. Finally, we motivate and discuss a class of tractable microstate models of black holes which can illuminate how the black hole complementarity principle can emerge operationally without encountering information paradoxes, and provide new insights into generation of desirable features of encoding into the Hawking radiation.
Previous works (by Almiehri, Dong, Harlow, Pastakawski, Preskill, Yoshida and others) have established that quantum error correction plays an important role in understanding how the bulk degrees of freedom of an Anti-deSitter spacetime are encoded in the degrees of freedom of the boundary Conformal Field Theory. In previous work \cite{Vaid2013Elementary} I have argued that the Bilson-Thompson model \cite{Bilson-Thompson2006Quantum,Vaid2010Embedding} of elementary particles allows us to view elementary particles as gates for universal quantum computation. In the present work I show that the Bilson-Thompson model, where elementary particles are represented by elements of the framed braid group on three strands, provides an explicit model for the generation of qutrit (three-qubit) states which are the ingredients of Shor's quantum error correcting code. This allows, for the first time, to connect in a concrete manner the proposals of Almheiri, Pastawski, Preskill and others regarding the role of quantum error correction in quantum gravity, to a viable model of elementary particles. Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), the theory of quantum gravity in which such topological excitations exist, can thus serve as the glue which can connect AdS/CFT based approaches to quantum gravity to the well understood physics of the Standard Model.
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.
It was recently shown by Harlow that any quantum error correcting code, satisfying the same complementary recovery properties as AdS/CFT, will obey a version of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula. In his most general result, Harlow allowed the bulk algebras to have nontrivial center, which was necessary for the "area operator" in this Ryu-Takayanagi formula to be nontrivial. However, the boundary Hilbert space was still assumed to factorise into Hilbert spaces associated with complementary boundary regions. We extend this work to include more general boundary theories, such as gauge theories, where the subalgebras associated with boundary regions may also have nontrivial center. We show the equivalence of a set of four conditions for a bulk algebra to be reconstructable from a boundary algebra, and then show that complementary recovery implies that the algebraic boundary entropy obeys a Ryu-Takayanagi formula. In contrast, we show that the distillable boundary entropy does not obey any such formula. If an additional "log dim R" term is added to the algebraic entropy, it will still obey a Ryu-Takayanagi formula, with a different area operator. However, since the "log dim R" term is a sum over local boundary contributions, we argue that it can only be related to the regularisation of the area at the bulk cut-off.
In holographic duality, a higher dimensional quantum gravity system emerges from a lower dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) with a large number of degrees of freedom. We propose a formulation of duality for a general causally complete bulk spacetime region, called subregion-subalgebra duality, which provides a framework to describe how geometric notions in the gravity system, such as spacetime subregions, different notions of times, and causal structure, emerge from the dual CFT. Subregion-subalgebra duality generalizes and brings new insights into subregion-subregion duality (or equivalently entanglement wedge reconstruction). It provides a mathematically precise definition of subregion-subregion duality and gives an independent definition of entanglement wedges without using entropy. Geometric properties of entanglement wedges, including those that play a crucial role in interpreting the bulk as a quantum error correcting code, can be understood from the duality as the geometrization of the superadditivity of certain algebras. Using general boundary subalgebras rather than those associated with geometric subregions makes it possible to find duals for general bulk spacetime regions, including those not touching the boundary. Applying subregion-subalgebra duality to a boundary state describing a single-sided black hole also provides a precise way to define mirror operators.