In systems with a large degeneracy of states such as black holes, one expects that the average value of probe correlation functions will be well approximated by the thermal ensemble. To understand how correlation functions in individual microstates differ from the canonical ensemble average and from each other, we study the variances in correlators. Using general statistical considerations, we show that the variance between microstates will be exponentially suppressed in the entropy. However, by exploiting the analytic properties of correlation functions we argue that these variances are amplified in imaginary time, thereby distinguishing pure states from the thermal density matrix. We demonstrate our general results in specific examples and argue that our results apply to the microstates of black holes.
In systems with a large degeneracy of states such as black holes, one expects that the average value of probe correlation functions will be well approximated by the thermal ensemble. To understand how correlation functions in individual microstates differ from the canonical ensemble average and from each other, we study the variances in correlators. Using general statistical considerations, we show that the variance between microstates will be exponentially suppressed in the entropy. However, by exploiting the analytic properties of correlation functions we argue that these variances are amplified in imaginary time, thereby distinguishing pure states from the thermal density matrix. We demonstrate our general results in specific examples and argue that our results apply to the microstates of black holes.
We study the relative entropy of highly excited quantum states. First, we sample states from the Wishart ensemble and develop a large-N diagrammatic technique for the relative entropy. The solution is exactly expressed in terms of elementary functions. We compare the analytic results to small-N numerics, finding precise agreement. Furthermore, the random matrix theory results accurately match the behavior of chaotic many-body eigenstates, a manifestation of eigenstate thermalization. We apply this formalism to the AdS/CFT correspondence where the relative entropy measures the distinguishability between different black hole microstates. We find that black hole microstates are distinguishable even when the observer has arbitrarily small access to the quantum state, though the distinguishability is nonperturbatively small in Newton's constant. Finally, we interpret these results in the context of the subsystem eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (SETH), concluding that holographic systems obey SETH up to subsystems half the size of the total system.
In this work, we study the distinguishability of random states drawn from the Wishart ensemble as well as black hole microstates.We compute the relative entropy and many generalizations, including the Petz Rényi relative entropy, sandwiched Rényi relative entropy, fidelities, and trace distances.These generalized quantities are able to teach us about new structures in the space of random states and black hole microstates where the von Neumann and relative entropies were insufficient.We further generalize to generic random tensor networks where new phenomena arise due to the locality in the networks.These phenomena sharpen the relationship between holographic states and random tensor networks.We discuss the implications of our results on the black hole information problem using replica wormholes, specifically the state dependence (hair) in Hawking radiation.Understanding the differences between Hawking radiation of distinct evaporating black holes is an important piece of the information problem that was not addressed by entropy calculations using the island formula.We interpret our results in the language of quantum hypothesis testing and the subsystem eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), deriving that chaotic (including holographic) systems obey subsystem ETH for all subsystems less than half the total system size.
It is well-known that a small system weakly coupled to a large energy bath in a total microcanonical ensemble will find itself in an (approximately) thermal state and, recently, it has been shown that, if the total state is, instead, a random pure state with energy in a narrow range, then the small system will still be approximately thermal with a high probability (wrt `Haar measure'). We ask what conditions are required for something resembling these 'traditional' and 'modern' thermality results to still hold when system and energy bath are of comparable size. In Part 1, we show that, for given system and energy-bath densities of states, s_S(e) and s_B(e), thermality does not hold in general, as we illustrate when both increase as powers of energy, but that it does hold in certain approximate senses, in both traditional and modern frameworks, when both grow as exp(be) or as exp(qe^2) and we calculate the system entropy in these cases. In their 'modern' version, our results rely on new quantities, which we introduce and call the S and B 'modapprox' density operators, which, we claim, will, with high probability, give a close approximation to the reduced density operator for the system and energy bath when the total state of system plus energy bath is a random pure state with energy in a narrow range. In Part 2 we clarify the meaning of these modapprox density operators and give arguments for our claim. The prime examples of non-small thermal systems are quantum black holes. Here and in two companion papers, we argue that current string-theoretic derivations of black hole entropy and thermal properties are incomplete and, on the question of information loss, inconclusive. However, we argue that these deficiencies are remedied with a modified scenario which relies on the modern strand of our methods and results here and is based on our previous 'matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis'.
Random quantum states are presently of interest in the fields of quantum information theory and quantum chaos. Moreover, a detailed study of their properties can shed light on some foundational issues of the quantum statistical mechanics such as the emergence of well-defined thermal properties from the pure quantum mechanical description of large many-body systems. When dealing with an ensemble of pure quantum states, two questions naturally arise, what is the probability density function on the parameters which specify the state of the system in a given ensemble, and does there exist a "most typical" value of a function of interest in the considered ensemble? Here, two different ensembles are considered, the random pure state ensemble (RPSE) and the fixed expectation energy ensemble (FEEE). By means of a suitable parametrization of the wave function in terms of populations and phases, we focus on the probability distribution of the populations in these ensembles. A comparison is made between the distribution induced by the inherent geometry of the Hilbert Space and an approximate distribution derived by means of the minimization of the informational functional. While the latter can be analytically handled, the exact geometrical distribution is sampled by a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. The analysis is made for an ensemble of wave functions describing an ideal system composed of n spins of 1/2 and reveals the salient differences between the geometrical and the approximate distributions. The analytical approximations are proven to be useful tools in order to obtain an ensemble-averaged quantity. In particular, we focus on the distribution of the Shannon entropy by providing an explanation of the emergence of a typical value of this quantity in the ensembles.
Abstract We identify typical high energy eigenstates in two-dimensional conformal field theories at finite c and establish that correlation functions of the stress tensor in such states are accurately thermal as defined by the standard canonical ensemble. Typical states of dimension h are shown to be typical level h/c descendants. In the AdS3/CFT2 correspondence, it is such states that should be compared to black holes in the bulk. We also discuss the discrepancy between thermal correlators and those computed in high energy primary states: the latter are reproduced instead by a generalized Gibbs ensemble with extreme values chosen for the chemical potentials conjugate to the KdV charges.
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.