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arXiv:1705.07943 · Physical review. D/Physical review. D.

Distinguishability of black hole microstates

Ning Bao, Hirosi Ooguri

Published Sep 18, 2017• 43 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We use the Holevo information to estimate distinguishability of microstates of a black hole in anti-de Sitter space by measurements one can perform on a subregion of a Cauchy surface of the dual conformal field theory. We find that microstates are not distinguishable at all until the subregion reaches a certain size and that perfect distinguishability can be achieved before the subregion covers the entire Cauchy surface. We will compare our results with expectations from the entanglement wedge reconstruction, tensor network models, and the bit threads interpretation of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula.

DOI
10.1103/physrevd.96.066017

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We use the Holevo information to estimate distinguishability of microstates of a black hole in anti-de Sitter space by measurements one can perform on a subregion of a Cauchy surface of the dual conformal field theory. We find that microstates are not distinguishable at all until the subregion reaches a certain size and that perfect distinguishability can be achieved before the subregion covers the entire Cauchy surface. We will compare our results with expectations from the entanglement wedge reconstruction, tensor network models, and the bit threads interpretation of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula.
We use Holevo information in the two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) with a large central charge c to distinguish microstates from the underlying thermal state. Holographically, the CFT microstates of a thermal state are dual to black hole microstate geometries in anti-de Sitter space. It was found recently that holographic Holevo information shows plateau behaviors at both short and long interval regions. This indicates that the black hole microstates are indistinguishable from the thermal state by measuring over a small region, and perfectly distinguishable over a region with its size comparable to the whole system. In this Letter, we demonstrate that the plateaus are lifted by including the 1/c corrections from both the vacuum and nonvacuum conformal families of CFT in either the canonical ensemble or microcanonical ensemble thermal state. Our results imply that the aforementioned indistinguishability and distinguishability of black hole microstate geometries from the underlying black hole are spoiled by higher order Newton constant G_{N} corrections of quantum gravity.
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.
A recent proposal by Ryu and Takayanagi for a holographic interpretation of entanglement entropy in conformal field theories dual to supergravity on anti-de Sitter space is generalized to include entanglement entropy of black holes living on the boundary of anti-de Sitter space. The generalized proposal is verified in boundary dimensions d=2 and d=4 for both the uv-divergent and uv-finite terms. In dimension d=4 an expansion of entanglement entropy in terms of size L of the subsystem outside the black hole is considered. A new term in the entropy of dual strongly coupled conformal-field theory, which universally grows as L(2)lnL and is proportional to the value of the obstruction tensor at the black hole horizon, is predicted.
In this work, we study the distinguishability of random states drawn from the Wishart ensemble as well as black hole microstates.We compute the relative entropy and many generalizations, including the Petz Rényi relative entropy, sandwiched Rényi relative entropy, fidelities, and trace distances.These generalized quantities are able to teach us about new structures in the space of random states and black hole microstates where the von Neumann and relative entropies were insufficient.We further generalize to generic random tensor networks where new phenomena arise due to the locality in the networks.These phenomena sharpen the relationship between holographic states and random tensor networks.We discuss the implications of our results on the black hole information problem using replica wormholes, specifically the state dependence (hair) in Hawking radiation.Understanding the differences between Hawking radiation of distinct evaporating black holes is an important piece of the information problem that was not addressed by entropy calculations using the island formula.We interpret our results in the language of quantum hypothesis testing and the subsystem eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), deriving that chaotic (including holographic) systems obey subsystem ETH for all subsystems less than half the total system size.
Abstract We define a generalized entanglement measure in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Compared to the ordinary entanglement entropy for a spatial subregion dual to the area of the Ryu-Takayanagi surface, we take into account both entanglement between spatial degrees of freedom as well as between different fields of the boundary theory. Moreover, we resolve the contribution to the entanglement entropy of strings with different winding numbers in the bulk geometry. We then calculate this generalized entanglement measure in a thermal state dual to the BTZ black hole in the setting of the D1/D5 system at and close to the orbifold point. We find that the entanglement entropy defined in this way is dual to the length of a geodesic with non-zero winding number. Such geodesics probe the entire bulk geometry, including the entanglement shadow up to the horizon in the one-sided black hole as well as the wormhole growth in the case of a two-sided black hole for an arbitrarily long time. Therefore, we propose that the entanglement structure of the boundary state is enough to reconstruct asymptotically AdS3 geometries up to extremal surface barriers.
We define a generalized entanglement measure in the context of AdS3_33​/CFT2_22​. Compared to the ordinary entanglement entropy between spatial degrees of freedom dual to the area of the Ryu-Takayanagi surface, we take into account both entanglement between spatial degrees of freedom as well as between different fields of the boundary CFT. We then calculate this generalized entanglement measure in a thermal state dual to the BTZ black hole in the setting of the D1/D5 system at and close to the orbifold point. We find that the entanglement entropy defined in this way is dual to the length of a geodesic with non-zero winding number. Such geodesics probe the entire bulk geometry, including regions known as entanglement shadows which are not reached by any Ryu-Takayanagi surface. This allows us to describe regions close to the black hole horizon in the one-sided black hole and the wormhole growth in the case of a two-sided black hole from entanglement data in the boundary field theory, leading us to propose that entanglement is in fact enough to reconstruct the full BTZ geometry from boundary data.