Local quenches, bulk entanglement entropy and a unitary Page curve
Cesar A. Agón, Sagar F. Lokhande, Juan F. Pedraza
备注：
52 pages + 2 appendices. Multiple figures. v2: new title, significantly improved introduction and minor changes in the text. v3: extended discussion on interpretation. Version to appear in JHEP
Quantum corrections to the entanglement entropy of matter fields interacting with dynamical gravity have proven to be very important in the study of the black hole information problem. We consider a one-particle excited state of a massive scalar field infalling in a pure AdS$_3$ geometry and compute these corrections for bulk subregions anchored on the AdS boundary. In the dual CFT$_2$, the state is given by the insertion of a local primary operator and its evolution thereafter. We calculate the area and bulk entanglement entropy corrections at order $\mathcal{O}(N^0)$, both in AdS and its CFT dual. The two calculations match, thus providing a non-trivial check of the FLM formula in a dynamical setting. Further, we observe that the bulk entanglement entropy follows a Page curve. We explain the precise sense in which our setup can be interpreted as a simple model of black hole evaporation and comment on the implications for the information problem.
Inspired by a recent model of Osuga and Page, we propose an explicitly unitary fermionic toy model for transferring information from a black hole to the outgoing radiation. The model treats the unitary evolution as a composition of the Hawking pair creation outside the black hole and of pair annihilation inside the black hole.
The notion of non-Hermitian PT symmetric quantum theory has recently been generalized to the gauge/gravity duality. We study the evolution of such non-Hermitian holographic field theories when the couplings are varied with time with particular emphasis on the question non-unitary time vs. unitary time evolution. We show that a non-unitary time evolution in the dual quantum theory corresponds to a violation of the Null Energy Condition (NEC) in the bulk of the asymptotically AdS spacetime. We find that upon varying the non-Hermitian coupling the horizon of a bulk AdS black hole shrinks. On the …
In a recent paper Osuga and Page have presented an explicitly unitary toy qubit transport model for transferring information from a black hole to the outgoing radiation. Following their idea we propose a unitary toy model which involves (fermionic) Hawking states.
Entanglement Dynamics by (Non-)Unitary Local Operator Quenches in a 2D Holographic CFT
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Kyoto University（京都大学）；RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS)（理化学研究所交叉理论数学科学中心(iTHEMS)）
We consider the unitary time evolution of a one-dimensional quantum system which is in a stationary state for negative times and then undergoes a sudden change (quench) of a parameter of its Hamiltonian at t=0. For systems possessing a continuum limit described by a massive quantum field theory we investigate in general perturbative quenches for the case in which the theory is integrable before the quench.
Understanding the entanglement of radiation in QFT has been a long standing challenge, with implications ranging from black hole thermodynamics to quantum information. We demonstrate how the case of the free fermion in $1 + 1$ dimensions reveals the details of the density matrix of the radiation produced by a moving mirror. Using the resolvent method rather than standard CFT techniques we derive the Rényi entropies, modular Hamiltonian and flow of the radiation, and determine when mirrors generate unitary transformations.
We propose a CFT unitary description of the gravitational collapse. The starting point is the model of a black hole in AdS proposed by Maldacena in arXiv: 0106112 [hep-th]. We show that by proposing a two-copies version of the AdS/CFT conjecture, the process of formation of black holes so as other spacetimes with horizons may be described as an unitary process in the dual field theory. In doing this, we construct a well defined framework to describe general spacetimes as entangled states, in terms of the spectrum of states on the exact Anti-de-Sitter background. As application, we show how the…
Recent developments on black holes have shown that a unitarity-compatible Page curve can be obtained from an ensemble-averaged semi-classical approximation. In this paper, we emphasize (1) that this peculiar manifestation of unitarity is not specific to black holes, and (2) that it can emerge from a single realization of an underlying unitary theory. To make things explicit, we consider a hard sphere gas leaking slowly from a small box into a bigger box. This is a quantum chaotic system in which we expect to see the Page curve in the full unitary description, while semi-classically, eigenstate…
We investigate the fine-grained entropy of the de Sitter cosmological horizon. Starting from three-dimensional pure de Sitter space, we consider a partial reduction approach, which supplies an auxiliary system acting as a heat bath both at future infinity and inside the static patch. This allows us to study the time-dependent entropy of radiation collected for both observers in the out-of-equilibrium Unruh-de Sitter state, analogous to black hole evaporation for a cosmological horizon. Central to our analysis in the static patch is the identification of a weakly gravitating region close to the…
We reformulate recent insights into black hole information in a manner emphasizing operationally-defined notions of entropy, Lorentz-signature descriptions, and asymptotically flat spacetimes. With the help of replica wormholes, we find that experiments of asymptotic observers are consistent with black holes as unitary quantum systems, with density of states given by the Bekenstein-Hawking formula. However, this comes at the cost of superselection sectors associated with the state of baby universes. Spacetimes studied by Polchinski and Strominger in 1994 provide a simple illustration of the as…
We investigate an entangled system, which is analogous to a composite system of a black hole and Hawking radiation. If Hawking radiation is well approximated by an outgoing particle generated from pair creation around the black hole, such a pair creation increases the total number of states. There should be a unitary mechanism to reduce the number of states inside the horizon for black hole evaporation. Because the infalling antiparticle has negative energy, as long as the infalling antiparticle finds its partner such that the two particles form a separable state, one can trace out such a zero…
Treating Maxwell soft hair as a transition function that relates U(1) gauge fields living in the asymptotic region and near-horizon region, the U(1) gauge parameter $ϕ$ naturally becomes a good label of those Maxwell soft hair degrees of freedom. This interpretation also builds the connection between Maxwell soft hair and U(1) edge modes living in the intermediate region, which admits a well-defined effective action description. We study the statistical properties by Euclidean path integral, which concludes that the soft hair density of state increases with black hole temperature. Hawking radi…
A new simple qubit model of black hole evaporation is proposed. The model operates on four qubits and is defined in terms of quantum gates and a quantum circuit. The chief features of the model include explicit unitarity and (most notably) causality which is understood as the impossibility of the transfer of information from the interior of the black hole through its horizon. The corresponding von Neumann entanglement entropy yields a crude (four-qubit) approximation of the Page curve.
We explore the Hawking evaporation of two-dimensional anti-de Sitter (AdS$_2$), dilatonic black hole coupled with conformal matter, and derive the Page curve for the entanglement entropy of radiation. We first work in a semiclassical approximation with backreaction. We show that the end-point of the evaporation process is AdS$_2$ with a vanishing dilaton, i.e. a regular, singularity-free, zero-entropy state. We explicitly compute the entanglement entropies of the black hole and the radiation, as functions of the horizon radius, using the conformal field theory (CFT) dual to AdS$_2$ gravity. We…
Localized unitary operators are basic probes of locality and causality in quantum systems: localized unitary operators create localized excitations in entangled states. Working with an explicit form, we explore the properties of these operators in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. We show that, unlike unitary operators, local non-unitary operators generically create non-local excitations. We present a local picture for quantum systems in which localized experimentalists can only act through localized Hamiltonian deformations, and therefore localized unitary operators. We demonstrate …
We consider the time evolution of mixed state correlation measures in two-dimensional conformal field theories, such as logarithmic negativity, odd entropy, and reflected entropy, after quantum quenches of various kinds. These correlation measures, in the holographic context, are all associated to the entanglement wedge cross section. We contrast various classes of conformal field theories, both rational and irrational (pure) conformal field theories. First, for rational conformal field theories, whose dynamics can be well described by the quasi-particle picture, we find all four quantities fo…
We consider the effect of grey-body factors on the entanglement island prescription for computing the entropy of an arbitrary subset of the Hawking radiation of an evaporating black hole. When there is a non-trivial grey-body factor, the modes reflected back into the black hole affect the position of the quantum extremal surfaces at a subleading level with respect to the scrambling time. The grey-body factor allows us to analyse the role of irreversibility in the evaporation. In particular, we show that irreversibility allows multiple saddles to dominate the entropy, rather than just two as ex…
If the evaporation of a black hole formed from a pure state is unitary, the entanglement entropy of the Hawking radiation should follow the Page curve, increasing from zero until near the halfway point of the evaporation, and then decreasing back to zero. The general argument for the Page curve is based on the assumption that the quantum state of the black hole plus radiation during the evaporation process is typical. In this paper, we show that the Page curve can result from a simple dynamical input in the evolution of the black hole, based on a recently proposed signature of quantum chaos, w…
After quantum quenches in many-body systems, finite subsystems evolve non-trivially in time, eventually approaching a stationary state. In typical situations, the reduced density matrix of a given subsystem begins and ends this endeavour as a low-entangled vector in the space of operators. This means that if its operator space entanglement initially grows (which is generically the case), it must eventually decrease, describing a barrier-shaped curve. Understanding the shape of this "entanglement barrier" is interesting for three main reasons: (i) it quantifies the dynamics of entanglement in t…
Typical entanglement in anyon chains: Page curves beyond Lie group symmetries
Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik（马克斯·普朗克量子光学研究所）；Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST)（慕尼黑量子科学与技术卓越集群）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学数学与统计学院）；School of Physics, The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学物理学院）；TUM School of Natural Sciences, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学自然科学学院）
For time-independent excited states in conformal field theories, the entanglement entropy of small subsystems satisfies a `first law'-like relation, in which the change in entanglement is proportional to the energy within the entangling region. Such a law holds for time-dependent scenarios as long as the state is perturbatively close to the vacuum, but is not expected otherwise. In this paper we use holography to investigate the spread of entanglement entropy for unitary evolutions of special physical interest, the so-called global quenches. We model these using AdS-Vaidya geometries. We find …
Using extended island formula we compute entanglement entropy of Hawking radiation for black hole solutions of certain gravitational models containing higher derivative terms. To be concrete we consider two different four dimensional models to compute entropy for both asymptotically flat and AdS black holes. One observes that the resultant entropy follows the Page curve, thanks to the contribution of the island, despite the fact that the corresponding gravitational models might be non-unitary.
For the first time, a gravitational calculation was recently shown to yield the Page curve for the entropy of Hawking radiation, consistent with unitary evolution. However, the calculation takes as essential input Hawking's result that the radiation entropy becomes large at late times. We call this apparent contradiction the state paradox. We exhibit its manifestations in standard and doubly-holographic settings, with and without an external bath. We clarify which version(s) of the Ryu-Takayanagi prescription apply in each setting. We show that the two possible homology rules in the presence o…
Naively, a resolution of the black hole information paradox appears to involve microscopic details of a theory of quantum gravity. However, recent work has argued that a unitary Page curve can be recovered by including novel replica instantons in the gravitational path integral. Moreover, replica instantons seem to rely on disorder averaging the microscopic theory, without a definite connection to a single, underlying unitary quantum system. In this letter, we show that disorder averaging and replica instantons emerge naturally from a gravitational effective theory built out of typical microsc…
In this paper we argue for a close connection between the non-existence of global symmetries in quantum gravity and a unitary resolution of the black hole information problem. In particular we show how the essential ingredients of recent calculations of the Page curve of an evaporating black hole can be used to generalize a recent argument against global symmetries beyond the AdS/CFT correspondence to more realistic theories of quantum gravity. We also give several low-dimensional examples of quantum gravity theories which do not have a unitary resolution of the black hole information problem …
Inspired by the Hayden-Preskill protocol for black hole evaporation, we consider the dynamics of a quantum many-body qudit system coupled to an external environment, where the time evolution is driven by the continuous limit of certain $2$-local random unitary circuits. We study both cases where the unitaries are chosen with and without a conserved $U(1)$ charge and focus on two aspects of the dynamics. First, we study analytically and numerically the growth of the entanglement entropy of the system, showing that two different time scales appear: one is intrinsic to the internal dynamics (the …
We reanalyze and expand upon models proposed in 2015 for linear dilaton black holes, and use them to test several speculative ideas about black hole physics. We examine ideas based on the definition of quantum extremal surfaces in quantum field theory in curved space-time. The low energy effective field theory of our model is the large N CGHS model, which includes the one loop effects that are taken into account in the "island" proposal for understanding the Page curve. Contrary to the results of the island analysis, that solution leads to a singular geometry for the evaporated black hole. If …
Recent works have revealed that quantum extremal islands can contribute to the fine-grained entropy of black hole radiation reproducing the unitary Page curve. In this paper, we use these results to assess if an observer in de Sitter space can decode information hidden behind their cosmological horizon. By computing the fine-grained entropy of the Gibbons-Hawking radiation in a region where gravity is weak we find that this is possible, but the observer's curiosity comes at a price. At the same time the island appears, which happens much earlier than the Page time, a singularity forms which th…
Hawking's model of black hole evaporation is not unitary and leads to a mixed density matrix for the emitted radiation, while the Page model describes a unitary evaporation process in which the density matrix evolves from an almost thermal state to a pure state. We compare a recently proposed model of semiclassical black hole evaporation to the two established models. In particular, we study the density matrix of the outgoing radiation and determine how the magnitude of the off-diagonal corrections differs for the three frameworks. For Hawking's model, we find power-law corrections to the two-…
In this paper, we study the thermofield double states of doubly-holographic gravity in two copies of the horizons. We show that the asymptotically AdS spacetimes describe an entangled states of a pair of CFTs based on the Farey sequence. We propose a new technique to geometrize the black hole horizon. Our protocol is based on the so-called Farey diagram. We construct states and entropies to describe the unit cells on the horizon. As a result, we have proved that the quantum states on the horizon are encoded by prime numbers. Therefore, we found that the entropy of the code space and area law a…
We study the evolution of entanglement entropy in a 2-dimensional equilibration process that has a holographic description in terms of a Vaidya geometry. It models a unitary evolution in which the field theory starts in a pure state, its vacuum, and undergoes a perturbation that brings it far from equilibrium. The entanglement entropy in this set up provides a measurement of the quantum entanglement in the system. Using holographic techniques we recover the same result obtained before from the study of processes triggered by a sudden change in a parameter of the hamiltonian, known as quantum q…
We map the dynamics of entanglement in random unitary circuits, with finite on-site Hilbert space dimension $q$, to an effective classical statistical mechanics, and develop general diagrammatic tools for calculations in random unitary circuits. We demonstrate explicitly the emergence of a `minimal membrane' governing entanglement growth, which in 1+1D is a directed random walk in spacetime (or a variant thereof). Using the replica trick to handle the logarithm in the definition of the $n$th Rényi entropy $S_n$, we map the calculation of the entanglement after a quench to a problem of interact…
In this work, we revisit the problem of finding entanglement islands in 2d Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity. We implement the following adjustments to the traditional setup: (1) we do not explicitly couple to a non-gravitating system, instead we implement only pure absorption into a fiducial detector, (2) we utilise the operationally defined renormalised matter entanglement entropy, as defined by the boundary observer's wordline. We show that this leads to a unitary Page curve that we explicitly compute, with an island outside of the event horizon. Next, we extend the analysis to a charged and/o…
