We study the holographic map in AdS/CFT, as modeled by a quantum error correcting code with exact complementary recovery. We show that the map is determined by local conditional expectations acting on the operator algebras of the boundary/physical Hilbert space. Several existing results in the literature follow easily from this perspective. The Black Hole area law, and more generally the Ryu-Takayanagi area operator, arises from a central sum of entropies on the relative commutant. These entropies are determined in a state independent way by the conditional expectation. The conditional expectation can also be found via a minimization procedure, similar to the minimization involved in the RT formula. For a local net of algebras associated to connected boundary regions, we show the complementary recovery condition is equivalent to the existence of a standard net of inclusions -- an abstraction of the mathematical structure governing QFT superselection sectors given by Longo and Rehren. For a code consisting of algebras associated to two disjoint regions of the boundary theory we impose an extra condition, dubbed dual-additivity, that gives rise to phase transitions between different entanglement wedges. Dual-additive codes naturally give rise to a new split code subspace, and an entropy bound controls which subspace and associated algebra is reconstructable. We also discuss known shortcomings of exact complementary recovery as a model of holography. For example, these codes are not able to accommodate holographic violations of additive for overlapping regions. We comment on how approximate codes can fix these issues.
We study the holographic map in AdS/CFT, as modeled by a quantum error correcting code with exact complementary recovery. We show that the map is determined by local conditional expectations acting on the operator algebras of the boundary/physical Hilbert space. Several existing results in the literature follow easily from this perspective. The Black Hole area law, and more generally the Ryu-Takayanagi area operator, arises from a central sum of entropies on the relative commutant. These entropies are determined in a state independent way by the conditional expectation. The conditional expectation can also be found via a minimization procedure, similar to the minimization involved in the RT formula. For a local net of algebras associated to connected boundary regions, we show the complementary recovery condition is equivalent to the existence of a standard net of inclusions -- an abstraction of the mathematical structure governing QFT superselection sectors given by Longo and Rehren. For a code consisting of algebras associated to two disjoint regions of the boundary theory we impose an extra condition, dubbed dual-additivity, that gives rise to phase transitions between different entanglement wedges. Dual-additive codes naturally give rise to a new split code subspace, and an entropy bound controls which subspace and associated algebra is reconstructable. We also discuss known shortcomings of exact complementary recovery as a model of holography. For example, these codes are not able to accommodate holographic violations of additive for overlapping regions. We comment on how approximate codes can fix these issues.
The holographic principle suggests that the low energy effective field theory of gravity, as used to describe perturbative quantum fields about some background has far too many states. It is then natural that any quantum error correcting code with such a quantum field theory as the code subspace is not isometric. We discuss how this framework can naturally arise in an algebraic QFT treatment of a family of CFT with a large-N limit described by the single trace sector. We show that an isometric code can be recovered in the N→∞ limit when acting on fixed states in the code Hilbert space. Asymptotically isometric codes come equipped with the notion of simple operators and nets of causal wedges. While the causal wedges are additive, they need not satisfy Haag duality, thus leading to the possibility of non-trivial entanglement wedge reconstructions. Codes with complementary recovery are defined as having extensions to Haag dual nets, where entanglement wedges are well defined for all causal boundary regions. We prove an asymptotic version of the information disturbance trade-off theorem and use this to show that boundary theory causality is maintained by net extensions. We give a characterization of the existence of an entanglement wedge extension via the asymptotic equality of bulk and boundary relative entropy or modular flow. While these codes are asymptotically exact, at fixed N they can have large errors on states that do not survive the large-N limit. This allows us to fix well known issues that arise when modeling gravity as an exact codes, while maintaining the nice features expected of gravity, including, among other things, the emergence of non-trivial von Neumann algebras of various types.
Tensor networks provide a natural framework for exploring holographic duality because they obey entanglement area laws. They have been used to construct explicit toy models realizing many of the interesting structural features of the AdS/CFT correspondence, including the non-uniqueness of bulk operator reconstruction in the boundary theory. In this article, we explore the holographic properties of networks of random tensors. We find that our models naturally incorporate many features that are analogous to those of the AdS/CFT correspondence. When the bond dimension of the tensors is large, we show that the entanglement entropy of all boundary regions, whether connected or not, obey the Ryu-Takayanagi entropy formula, a fact closely related to known properties of the multipartite entanglement of assistance. We also discuss the behavior of Rényi entropies in our models and contrast it with AdS/CFT. Moreover, we find that each boundary region faithfully encodes the physics of the entire bulk entanglement wedge, i.e., the bulk region enclosed by the boundary region and the minimal surface. Our method is to interpret the average over random tensors as the partition function of a classical ferromagnetic Ising model, so that the minimal surfaces of Ryu-Takayanagi appear as domain walls. Upon including the analog of a bulk field, we find that our model reproduces the expected corrections to the Ryu-Takayanagi formula: the bulk minimal surface is displaced and the entropy is augmented by the entanglement of the bulk field. Increasing the entanglement of the bulk field ultimately changes the minimal surface behavior topologically, in a way similar to the effect of creating a black hole. Extrapolating bulk correlation functions to the boundary permits the calculation of the scaling dimensions of boundary operators, which exhibit a large gap between a small number of low-dimension operators and the rest. While we are primarily motivated by the AdS/CFT duality, the main results of the article define a more general form of bulk-boundary correspondence which could be useful for extending holography to other spacetimes.
A bstract The AdS/CFT correspondence realises the holographic principle where information in the bulk of a space is encoded at its border. We are yet a long way from a full mathematical construction of AdS/CFT, but toy models in the form of holographic quantum error correcting codes (HQECC) have replicated some interesting features of the correspondence. In this work we construct new HQECCs built from random stabilizer tensors that describe a duality between models encompassing local Hamiltonians whilst exactly obeying the Ryu-Takayanagi entropy formula for all boundary regions. We also obtain complementary recovery of local bulk operators for any boundary bipartition. Existing HQECCs have been shown to exhibit these properties individually, whereas our mathematically rigorous toy models capture these features of AdS/CFT simultaneously, advancing further towards a complete construction of holographic duality.
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 N 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=∞ 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.
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.