We study information retrieval from evaporating black holes, assuming that the internal dynamics of a black hole is unitary and rapidly mixing, and assuming that the retriever has unlimited control over the emitted Hawking radiation. If the evaporation of the black hole has already proceeded past the ``half-way'' point, where half of the initial entropy has been radiated away, then additional quantum information deposited in the black hole is revealed in the Hawking radiation very rapidly. Information deposited prior to the half-way point remains concealed until the half-way point, and then emerges quickly. These conclusions hold because typical local quantum circuits are efficient encoders for quantum error-correcting codes that nearly achieve the capacity of the quantum erasure channel. Our estimate of a black hole's information retention time, based on speculative dynamical assumptions, is just barely compatible with the black hole complementarity hypothesis.

http://absimage.aps.org/image/MAR08/MWS_MAR08-2007-003180.pdf

Black holes as mirrors: quantum information in random subsystems

Conformal field theories have been long known to describe the fascinating universal physics of scale invariant critical points. They describe continuous phase transitions in fluids, magnets, and numerous other materials, while at the same time sit at the heart of our modern understanding of quantum field theory. For decades it has been a dream to study these intricate strongly coupled theories nonperturbatively using symmetries and other consistency conditions. This idea, called the conformal bootstrap, saw some successes in two dimensions but it is only in the last ten years that it has been fully realized in three, four, and other dimensions of interest. This renaissance has been possible both due to significant analytical progress in understanding how to set up the bootstrap equations and the development of numerical techniques for finding or constraining their solutions. These developments have led to a number of groundbreaking results, including world record determinations of critical exponents and correlation function coefficients in the Ising and $O(N)$ models in three dimensions. This article will review these exciting developments for newcomers to the bootstrap, giving an introduction to conformal field theories and the theory of conformal blocks, describing numerical techniques for the bootstrap based on convex optimization, and summarizing in detail their applications to fixed points in three and four dimensions with no or minimal supersymmetry.

The Conformal Bootstrap: Theory, Numerical Techniques, and Applications

We review the imaginary time path integral approach to the quench dynamics of conformal field theories. We show how this technique can be applied to the determination of the time dependence of correlation functions and entanglement entropy for both global and local quenches. We also briefly review other quench protocols. We carefully discuss the limits of applicability of these results to realistic models of condensed matter and cold atoms.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-5468/2016/06/064003/pdf

Quantum quenches in 1 + 1 dimensional conformal field theories

Quantum quenches in 1+1 dimensional conformal field theories

We present a first-principles CFT calculation corresponding to the spherical collapse of a shell of matter in three dimensional quantum gravity. In field theory terms, we describe the equilibration process, from early times to thermalization, of a CFT following a sudden injection of energy at time t = 0. By formulating a continuum version of Zamolodchikov’s monodromy method to calculate conformal blocks at large central charge c, we give a framework to compute a general class of probe observables in the collapse state, incorporating the full backreaction of matter fields on the dual geometry. This is illustrated by calculating a scalar field two-point function at time-like separation and the time-dependent entanglement entropy of an interval, both showing thermalization at late times. The results are in perfect agreement with previous gravity calculations in the AdS3-Vaidya geometry. Information loss appears in the CFT as an explicit violation of unitarity in the 1/c expansion, restored by nonperturbative corrections.

/pdf/black-hole-collapse-in-the-1-c-expansion-4aroykva1u.pdf

Black hole collapse in the 1 /c expansion

We consider time-dependent entanglement entropy (EE) for a 1+1 dimensional CFT in the presence of angular momentum and U(1) charge. The EE saturates, irrespective of the initial state, to the grand canonical entropy after a time large compared with the length of the entangling interval. We reproduce the CFT results from an AdS dual consisting of a spinning BTZ black hole and a flat U(1) connection. The apparent discrepancy that the holographic EE does not a priori depend on the U(1) charge while the CFT EE does, is resolved by the charge-dependent shift between the bulk and boundary stress tensors. We show that for small entangling intervals, the entanglement entropy obeys the first law of thermodynamics, as conjectured recently. The saturation of the EE in the field theory is shown to follow from a version of quantum ergodicity; the derivation indicates that it should hold for conformal as well as massive theories in any number of dimensions.

Dynamical entanglement entropy with angular momentum and U(1) charge

We consider conformal blocks of two heavy operators and an arbitrary number of light operators in a (1+1)-d CFT with large central charge. Using the monodromy method, these higher-point conformal blocks are shown to factorize into products of 4-point conformal blocks in the heavy-light limit for a class of OPE channels. This result is reproduced by considering suitable worldline configurations in the bulk conical defect geometry. We apply the CFT results to calculate the entanglement entropy of an arbitrary number of disjoint intervals for heavy states. The corresponding holographic entanglement entropy calculated via the minimal area prescription precisely matches these results from CFT. Along the way, we briefly illustrate the relation of these conformal blocks to Riemann surfaces and their associated moduli space.

/pdf/higher-point-conformal-blocks-and-entanglement-entropy-in-569t4ym7wr.pdf

Higher-point conformal blocks and entanglement entropy in heavy states

In this note, we study a melonic tensor model in d dimensions based on three-index Dirac fermions with a four-fermion interaction. Summing the melonic diagrams at strong coupling allows one to define a formal large-N saddle point in arbitrary d and calculate the spectrum of scalar bilinear singlet operators. For d = 2 − ϵ the theory is an infrared fixed point, which we find has a purely real spectrum that we determine numerically for arbitrary d 2, the spectrum can still be calculated using the saddle point equations, which may define a formal large-N ultraviolet fixed point analogous to the Gross-Neveu model in d > 2. For 2 < d < 6, we find that the spectrum contains at least one complex scalar eigenvalue (similar to the complex eigenvalue present in the bosonic tensor model recently studied by Giombi, Klebanov and Tarnopolsky) which indicates that the theory is unstable. We also find that the fixed point is weakly-interacting when d = 6 (or more generally d = 4n + 2) and has a real spectrum for 6 < d < 6.14 which we present as a power series in ϵ in 6 + ϵ dimensions.

/pdf/a-complex-fermionic-tensor-model-in-d-dimensions-125xem0g8n.pdf

A complex fermionic tensor model in d dimensions

We study the long time behaviour of local observables following a quantum quench in 1+1 dimensional conformal field theories possessing additional conserved charges besides the energy. We show that the expectation value of an arbitrary string of local ob-servables supported on a finite interval exponentially approaches an equilibrium value. The equilibrium is characterized by a temperature and chemical potentials defined in terms of the quenched state. For an infinite number of commuting conserved charges, the equilibrium ensemble is a generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). We compute the thermalization rate in a systematic perturbation in the chemical potentials, using a new technique to sum over an infinite number of Feynman diagrams. The above technique also allows us to compute relaxation times for thermal Green’s functions in the presence of an arbitrary number of chemical potentials. In the context of a higher spin (hs[λ]) holography, the partition function of the final equilibrium GGE is known to agree with that of a higher spin black hole. The thermalization rate from the CFT computed in our paper agrees with the quasinormal frequency of a scalar field in this black hole.

/pdf/thermalization-with-chemical-potentials-and-higher-spin-oaiijeq9uw.pdf

Thermalization with chemical potentials, and higher spin black holes

We present the complete family of solutions of 3D gravity (Λ < 0) with two asymptotically AdS exterior regions. The solutions are constructed from data at the two boundaries, which correspond to two independent and arbitrary stress tensors T
 R
 , $$ {\overset{-}{T}}_R $$
 , and T
 L
 , $$ {\overset{-}{T}}_L $$
 . The two exteriors are smoothly joined on to an interior region through a regular horizon. We find CFT duals of these geometries which are entangled states of two CFT’s. We compute correlators between general operators at the two boundaries and find perfect agreement between CFT and bulk calculations. We calculate and match the CFT entanglement entropy (EE) with the holographic EE which involves geodesics passing through the wormhole. We also compute a holographic, non-equilibrium entropy for the CFT using properties of the regular horizon. The construction of the bulk solutions here uses an exact version of Brown-Henneaux type diffeomorphisms which are asymptotically nontrivial and transform the CFT states by two independent unitary operators on the two sides. Our solutions provide an infinite family of explicit examples of the ER=EPR relation of Maldacena and Susskind [1].

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/JHEP01(2015)036.pdf

Ritam Sinha

Papers

Dynamical entanglement entropy with angular momentum and U(1) charge

Higher-point conformal blocks and entanglement entropy in heavy states

A complex fermionic tensor model in d dimensions

Thermalization with chemical potentials, and higher spin black holes

The inside outs of AdS3/CFT2: exact AdS wormholes with entangled CFT duals