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arXiv:1810.01444 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Regenesis and quantum traversable wormholes

Ping Gao, Hong Liu

Published Oct 1, 2019• 30 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Recent gravity discussions of a traversable wormhole indicate that in holographic systems signals generated by a source could reappear long after they have dissipated, with the need of only performing some simple operations. In this paper we argue the phenomenon, to which we refer as “regenesis”, is universal in general quantum chaotic many-body systems, and elucidate its underlying physics. The essential elements behind the phenomenon are: (i) scrambling which in a chaotic system makes out-of-time-ordered correlation functions (OTOCs) vanish at large times; (ii) the entanglement structure of the state of the system. The latter aspect also implies that the regenesis phenomenon requires fine tuning of the initial state. Compared to other manifestations of quantum chaos such as the initial growth of OTOCs which deals with early times, and a random matrix-type energy spectrum which reflects very large time behavior, regenesis concerns with intermediate times, of order the scrambling time of a system. We also study the phenomenon in detail in general two-dimensional conformal field theories in the large central charge limit, and highlight some interesting features including a resonant enhancement of regenesis signals near the scrambling time and their oscillations in coupling. Finally, we discuss gravity implications of the phenomenon for systems with a gravity dual, arguing that there exist regimes for which traversability of a wormhole is quantum in nature, i.e. cannot be associated with a semi-classical spacetime causal structure.

DOI
10.1007/jhep10(2019)048

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Abstract Recent gravity discussions of a traversable wormhole indicate that in holographic systems signals generated by a source could reappear long after they have dissipated, with the need of only performing some simple operations. In this paper we argue the phenomenon, to which we refer as “regenesis”, is universal in general quantum chaotic many-body systems, and elucidate its underlying physics. The essential elements behind the phenomenon are: (i) scrambling which in a chaotic system makes out-of-time-ordered correlation functions (OTOCs) vanish at large times; (ii) the entanglement structure of the state of the system. The latter aspect also implies that the regenesis phenomenon requires fine tuning of the initial state. Compared to other manifestations of quantum chaos such as the initial growth of OTOCs which deals with early times, and a random matrix-type energy spectrum which reflects very large time behavior, regenesis concerns with intermediate times, of order the scrambling time of a system. We also study the phenomenon in detail in general two-dimensional conformal field theories in the large central charge limit, and highlight some interesting features including a resonant enhancement of regenesis signals near the scrambling time and their oscillations in coupling. Finally, we discuss gravity implications of the phenomenon for systems with a gravity dual, arguing that there exist regimes for which traversability of a wormhole is quantum in nature, i.e. cannot be associated with a semi-classical spacetime causal structure.
With the long-term goal of studying models of quantum gravity in the lab, we propose holographic teleportation protocols that can be readily executed in table-top experiments. These protocols exhibit similar behavior to that seen in the recent traversable wormhole constructions of [1,2]: information that is scrambled into one half of an entangled system will, following a weak coupling between the two halves, unscramble into the other half. We introduce the concept of teleportation by size to capture how the physics of operator-size growth naturally leads to information transmission. The transmission of a signal through a semi-classical holographic wormhole corresponds to a rather special property of the operator-size distribution we call size winding. For more general systems (which may not have a clean emergent geometry), we argue that imperfect size winding is a generalization of the traversable wormhole phenomenon. In addition, a form of signalling continues to function at high temperature and at large times for generic chaotic systems, even though it does not correspond to a signal going through a geometrical wormhole, but rather to an interference effect involving macroscopically different emergent geometries. Finally, we outline implementations feasible with current technology in two experimental platforms: Rydberg atom arrays and trapped ions.
A bstract The rapid development of quantum science and technology is leading us into an era where quantum many-body systems can be comprehended through quantum simulations. Holographic duality, which states gravity and spacetime can emerge from strongly interacting systems, then offers a natural avenue for the experimental study of gravity physics without delving into experimentally infeasible high energies. A prominent example is the simulation of traversable wormholes through the wormhole teleportation protocol, attracting both theoretical and experimental attention. In this work, we develop the theoretical framework for computing the fidelity of wormhole teleportation in N -qubit systems with all-to-all interactions, quantified by mutual information and entanglement negativity. The main technique is the scramblon effective theory, which captures universal out-of-time-order correlations in generic chaotic systems. We clarify that strong couplings between the two systems are essential for simulating the probe limit of semi-classical traversable wormholes using strongly interacting systems with near-maximal chaos. However, the teleportation signal diminishes rapidly when reducing the system size N , requiring a large number of qubits to observe a sharp signature of emergent geometry by simulating the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. This includes both the causal time-order of signals and the asymmetry of the teleportation signal for coupling with different signs. As a comparison, the teleportation signal increases when reducing N in weakly interacting systems. We also analyze the fidelity of the generalized encoding scheme in fermionic string operators.
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.
A bstract Fast scrambling is a distinctive feature of quantum gravity, which by means of holography is closely tied to the behaviour of large- c conformal field theories. We study this phenomenon in the context of semiclassical Liouville theory, providing both insights into the mechanism of scrambling in CFTs and into the structure of Liouville theory, finding that it exhibits a maximal Lyapunov exponent despite not featuring the identity in its spectrum. However, as we show, the states contributing to the relevant correlation function can be thought of as dressed scramblons. At a technical level we first use the path integral picture in order to derive the Euclidean four-point function in an explicit compact form. Next, we demonstrate its equivalence to a conformal block expansion, revealing an explicit but non-local map between path integral saddles and conformal blocks. By analytically continuing both expressions to Lorentzian times, we obtain two equivalent formulations of the OTOC, which we use to study the onset of chaos in Liouville theory. We take advantage of the compact form in order to extract a Lyapunov exponent and a scrambling time. From the conformal block expansion formulation of the OTOC we learn that scrambling shifts the dominance of conformal blocks from heavy primaries at early times to the lightest primary at late times. Finally, we discuss our results in the context of holography.
The realization of holographic duality on near-term intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware requires identifying sparse Hamiltonians that retain essential gravitational features. While previous approaches rely on machine-learning optimization to find such models, we demonstrate that simple magnitude-based pruning of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model preserves holographic transport at sparsities ≈5%. By mapping the phase diagram of sparsified SYK (N ≤ 12), we identify a distinct phase boundary where quantum chaos, diagnosed via the Spectral Form Factor (SFF), dissolves, even while traversable wormhole signatures persist. This decoupling suggests that information scrambling can occur without the emergent geometry required for gravity. We validate the gravitational phenomenon of the chaotic phase by observing a quantized Shapiro time delay in the teleportation signal with perturbation, consistent with the emergence of bulk geometry. Finally, we show that this robustness is unique to all-to-all connectivity. Imposing linear local geometry destroys the holographic phase, highlighting non-locality as critical for quantum gravity simulations.
We study various aspects of wormholes that are made traversable by an interaction beween the two asymptotic boundaries. We concentrate on the case of nearly‐ gravity and discuss a very simple mechanical picture for the gravitational dynamics. We derive a formula for the two sided correlators that includes the effect of gravitational backreaction, which limits the amount of information we can send through the wormhole. We emphasize that the process can be viewed as a teleportation protocol where the teleportee feels nothing special as he/she goes through the wormhole. We discuss some applications to the cloning paradox for old black holes. We point out that the same formula we derived for gravity is also valid for the simple SYK quantum mechanical theory, around the thermofield double state. We present a heuristic picture for this phenomenon in terms of an operator growth model. Finally, we show that a similar effect is present in a completely classical chaotic system with a large number of degrees of freedom.