Abstract Recent discovery of the fine-grained entropy formula in gravity succeeded in reconstructing the Page curves that are compatible with unitary evolution. The formula of generalized entropy derived from the gravitational path integration, nevertheless, does not provide a concrete insight on how information comes out from a black hole. In this paper, we start from a qubit model and provide a quantum informational interpretation of entanglement islands. We propose an identification of entanglement islands with quantum measurements and remark on the parallel between the black hole information problem and the old problem of quantum measurements. We show that the Page curve can still be realized even if information is lost so that the information paradox can be explained as one manifestation of measurement problem. We show that such interpretation is necessary for a quantum informational model if smooth horizons and bulk reconstruction are assumed, and demonstrate explicitly that Page curves of solvable 2D gravity can be obtained through teleportation and entanglement swapping. We argue that the similarities between the black hole information problem and the measurement problem suggest links in the origins of the two problems.
Abstract Recent discovery of the fine-grained entropy formula in gravity succeeded in reconstructing the Page curves that are compatible with unitary evolution. The formula of generalized entropy derived from the gravitational path integration, nevertheless, does not provide a concrete insight on how information comes out from a black hole. In this paper, we start from a qubit model and provide a quantum informational interpretation of entanglement islands. We propose an identification of entanglement islands with quantum measurements and remark on the parallel between the black hole information problem and the old problem of quantum measurements. We show that the Page curve can still be realized even if information is lost so that the information paradox can be explained as one manifestation of measurement problem. We show that such interpretation is necessary for a quantum informational model if smooth horizons and bulk reconstruction are assumed, and demonstrate explicitly that Page curves of solvable 2D gravity can be obtained through teleportation and entanglement swapping. We argue that the similarities between the black hole information problem and the measurement problem suggest links in the origins of the two problems.
The Island Formula for Quantum Extremal Surfaces of large AdS black holes, which are made to evaporate by coupling the CFT of the AdS/CFT correspondence to an external system, demonstrates that the space time picture can reproduce the quantum mechanically required Page curve of the CFT/bath system if a region in the interior of the black hole has become entangled with the external radiation by the Page time. In an effective quantum field theory (EFT) description in ``nice slice" coordinates, this appears to imply paradoxical entanglement between degrees of freedom that have been causally disconnected since long before the Page time. We will give two arguments that all of the quantum information in the island is in fact concentrated in a tiny space-like portion of the island very close to the black hole horizon at the Page time. The first applies the covariant entropy bound\cite{fsb} (CEB) to the causal diamonds of geodesics originating on the space-like region that becomes the island, but on a time slice just before the Page time. All points on the island except those in a stretched horizon region very close to the horizon have entropy bounds that are tiny fractions of the black hole entropy. The second argument uses standard quantum statistical mechanics combined with the tensor network renormalization group regularization of CFT to argue that the wave function of a typical pure state in the microcanonical evaporating black hole always has most of its probability concentrated in a small range of wavelengths corresponding to a small range of radii in the dual tensor network/AdS slice.
We study thermodynamic properties and the entanglement island of a black hole in asymptotically safe quantum gravity, analyzing key thermodynamic quantities such as the Hawking temperature, heat capacity, and entropy, as well as the mass-horizon radius relation. Unlike Schwarzschild black holes, the temperature decreases with mass near the evaporation endpoint, signaling a phase transition and possible stable remnant. The entanglement entropy of Hawking radiation is obtained both with and without island contributions. Without islands, the radiation entropy grows linearly indefinitely, leading to the information paradox. By including island contributions and extremizing the generalized entropy functional, we resolve this paradox. At late times, the radiation entropy saturates at the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, confirming unitary evolution. From this, we derive the Page time and scrambling time by equating early- and late-time entanglement entropies. The result of this study establishes the finiteness of the radiation entropy and consistency with quantum mechanics.
In this note we discuss a topological realization of the quantum teleportation protocol. Such a realization facilitates keeping track of the evolution of quantum correlations in the system. It is then suggested, that an implementation of a similar protocol can serve as a toy model of a process of information transfer between causally disconnected regions, such as the one that should take place in a unitary evolution of a quantum black hole. Hawking quanta provide the necessary entangled pairs for the teleportation channel, and the same interaction mechanism that creates the Hawking pairs, destroys the entanglement at the late stages of the evolution. Different steps of the teleportation protocol are characterized by the entropies associated with the disconnected regions, and one can introduce an analog of the Page curve for the entropy of the Hawking radiation. Some regions of the “black hole” interior appear to actually encode the information of the exterior, so it is natural to identify them with the “islands” of the semiclassical gravity analysis.
A bstract In recent years, there is a huge progress in understanding the black hole information problem, and the key is that the black hole entropy of radiation should be calculated by the island formula, which describes the Page curve to ensure the unitarity of black hole evaporation. In the paper, we find that the black hole evaporation interpreted by the island formula can be understood in the language of approximate quantum error correction. Furthermore, the Page transition, as a special property of the Page curve, should be understood as the property of approximate quantum error correction itself, i.e. a general class of quantum systems under certain conditions from approximate quantum error correction can also exhibit phenomenon similar to the Page transition.
Abstract In this paper, we obtain some general results on information retrieval from the black hole interior, based on the recent progress on quantum extremal surface formula and entanglement island. We study an AdS black hole coupled to a bath with generic dynamics, and ask whether it is possible to retrieve information about a small perturbation in the interior from the bath system. We show that the one-norm distance between two reduced states in a bath region A is equal to the same quantity in the bulk quantum field theory for region AI where I is the entanglement island of A. This is a straightforward generalization of bulk-boundary correspondence in AdS/CFT. However, we show that a contradiction arises if we apply this result to a special situation when the bath dynamics includes a unitary operation that carries a particular measurement to a region A and send the result to another region W. Physically, the contradiction arises between transferability of classical information during the measurement, and non-transferability of quantum information which determines the entanglement island. We propose that the resolution of the contradiction is to realize that the state reconstruction formula does not apply to the special situation involving interior-information-retrieving measurements. This implies that the assumption of smooth replica AdS geometry with boundary condition set by the flat space bath has to break down when the particular measurement operator is applied to the bath. Using replica trick, we introduce an explicitly construction of such operator, which we name as “miracle operators”. From this construction we see that the smooth replica geometry assumption breaks down because we have to introduce extra replica wormholes connecting with the “simulated blackholes” introduced by the miracle operator. We study the implication of miracle operators in understanding the firewall paradox.
Abstract Entanglement entropy, or von Neumann entropy, quantifies the amount of uncertainty of a quantum state. For quantum fields in curved space, entanglement entropy of the quantum field theory degrees of freedom is well-defined for a fixed background geometry. In this paper, we propose a generalization of the quantum field theory entanglement entropy by including dynamical gravity. The generalized quantity named effective entropy, and its Renyi entropy generalizations, are defined by analytic continuation of a replica calculation. The replicated theory is defined as a gravitational path integral with multiple copies of the original boundary conditions, with a co-dimension-2 brane at the boundary of region we are studying. We discuss different approaches to define the region in a gauge invariant way, and show that the effective entropy satisfies the quantum extremal surface formula. When the quantum fields carry a significant amount of entanglement, the quantum extremal surface can have a topology transition, after which an entanglement island region appears. Our result generalizes the Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi formula of holographic entropy (with quantum corrections) to general geometries without asymptotic AdS boundary, and provides a more solid framework for addressing problems such as the Page curve of evaporating black holes in asymptotic flat spacetime. We apply the formula to two example systems, a closed two-dimensional universe and a four-dimensional maximally extended Schwarzchild black hole. We discuss the analog of the effective entropy in random tensor network models, which provides more concrete understanding of quantum information properties in general dynamical geometries. We show that, in absence of a large boundary like in AdS space case, it is essential to introduce ancilla that couples to the original system, in order for correctly characterizing quantum states and correlation functions in the random tensor network. Using the superdensity operator formalism, we study the system with ancilla and show how quantum information in the entanglement island can be reconstructed in a state-dependent and observer-dependent map. We study the closed universe (without spatial boundary) case and discuss how it is related to open universe.