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arXiv:1808.05963 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Traversable wormholes as quantum channels: exploring CFT entanglement structure and channel capacity in holography

Ning Bao, Aidan Chatwin-Davies, Jason Pollack, Grant N. Remmen

Published Nov 1, 2018• 26 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A bstract We interpret the traversable wormhole in AdS/CFT in the context of quantum information theory. In particular, we investigate its properties as both a quantum channel and entanglement witness. We define protocols that allow either the bounding of the channel’s entanglement capacity or the determination of aspects of the entanglement structure between the two boundary CFTs. Such protocols and connections allow for the use of quantum channel techniques in the study of gravitational physics and vice versa. More generally, our results suggest a purely quantum information-theoretic criterion for recognizing when the product of two boundary theories has a classical bulk interpretation.

DOI
10.1007/jhep11(2018)071

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This thesis studies non-locality in quantum gravity from two directions. The first concerns detection: in AdS/CFT, the gravitational Hamiltonian is a boundary observable, and its correlator with a bulk operator can be nonzero at spacelike separation. We develop a single-copy boundary protocol that exploits this structure to detect a bulk excitation before any causal signal has reached the boundary. The protocol backreacts by inducing an uncertainty in the relative bulk-boundary time shift, and we show that this backreaction controls the tradeoff between detection speed and precision. The protocol fails when the bulk operator can be dressed to commute with the boundary Hamiltonian, a condition satisfied by black hole microstates. We introduce two novel dressed-operator constructions that interpolate between holographic accessibility and effective bulk locality: an emergent clock built from the energy level spacing, and an entanglement-based dressing to an external observer via a quantum wormhole. The second part concerns transport. We study two coupled critical transverse-field Ising chains and show that this system, which has no known geometric dual, exhibits several signatures of traversable wormhole transport: a thermofield-double-like ground state, coherent left-right transfer with a timescale controlled by the Ising CFT scaling dimension, and entanglement dynamics that track the signal.