A bstract Disentangled black hole microstates are atypical states in holographic CFTs whose gravity duals do not have smooth horizons. If there exist sufficiently many disentangled microstates to account for the entire black hole entropy, then any black hole microstate can be written as a superposition of states without smooth horizons. We show that there exist sufficiently many disentangled microstates to account for almost the entire black hole entropy of a large AdS black hole at the semiclassical limit G N → 0. In addition, we also argue that in generic quantum many-body systems with short-ranged interactions, there exist sufficiently many area law states in the microcanonical subspace to account for almost the entire thermodynamic entropy in the standard thermodynamic limit. Area law states are atypical since a typical state should contain volume law entanglement. Furthermore, we also present an explicit way to construct such a set of area law states, and argue that the same construction may also be used to construct disentangled states.
We argue that one of the following statements must be true: (a) extensive violations of quantum information theory's additivity conjectures exist or (b) there exists a set of `disentangled' black hole microstates that can account for the entire Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, up to at most a subleading
O(1) correction. Possibility (a) would be a significant result in quantum communication theory, demonstrating that entanglement can enhance the ability to transmit information much more than has currently been established. Option (b) would provide new insight into the microphysics of black holes. In particular, the disentangled microstates would have to have nontrivial structure at or outside the black hole horizon, assuming the validity of the quantum extremal surface prescription for calculating entanglement entropy in AdS/CFT.
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.
We study multipartite entanglement in typical pure states holographically dual to pure BTZ black holes, using multi-entropy and its ``genuine'' version. In the bulk, these quantities are computed by minimal geodesic networks (so-called Steiner trees). We find that at sufficiently high temperature, the genuine tripartite multi-entropy exhibits a volume-law scaling in sharp contrast to vacuum AdS
3, where the genuine contribution is universal and size-independent. Moreover, we find another phase: once one subsystem exceeds half of the total system, the leading genuine tripartite entanglement vanishes and reduces to that for global AdS
3. This transition is indeed consistent with recent arguments for distillable EPR pairs in tripartite Haar-random states. Motivated by finite-cutoff holography, we further study the radial cutoff dependence of multi-entropy and show that genuine multi-entropy acquires nontrivial size dependence even for the tripartite case in AdS
3. As a byproduct, we also observe an intriguing ``area-law'' contribution to multi-entropy that is relevant to vacuum AdS
3.
A bstract We consider holographic entanglement entropy in AdS black hole backgrounds by using the limit of large number of dimensions. By dividing the geometry to two patches (with one patch covering the vicinity of the black hole horizon and another covering the other regions), we are able to obtain fully analytic expressions for the entropy when the entanglement region is a strip. We argue that apart from conformal field theories at finite temperature in high number of dimensions, our method works for nearly critical theories in 3+1 dimensions. In the case of extremal black holes, dual to quantum critical systems, the results take a particularly simple form. We also comment on the case of soliton geometries. Finally, we analyze entanglement entropy for wide strips, and propose a general formula for the first subleading term in the expansion of the entropy in (inverse) system size for generic entanglement regions.
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.
We introduce a new way to produce infinite families of bases of a quantum system's Hilbert space, as well as methods to find its dimension. These families are constructed via Brownian motions in the Hilbert space, defined using disordered, time-dependent couplings. The dimension spanned by them has zero variance over the ensemble of disordered couplings, and it is determined by certain replica partition functions. We apply these methods to finite dimensional
q-local systems (spin clusters and SYK) and black holes. For
q-local systems we find exact expressions at finite
q,
N, and
t, for replica partition functions, together with universal behavior at large times and a semiclassical analysis at large-
N in appropriate master field variables. The right Hilbert space dimension is obtained for any time
t>0,
q>1 and
N>0. For black holes, the Brownian motions prepare quantitatively generic ensembles of black hole microstates, and the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy is universally reproduced by counting those. There the
n-replica partition functions are constructed by gluing
n-traversable womrholes at their future and past. This method demonstrates the robustness of black hole microstate counting methods, avoiding several limitations of previous constructions, including the non-genericity of the microstates and associated interiors, implicit statistics of heavy operators, limited microscopic control over overlaps, and the need for specific limits in the calculation.