Aidan Chatwin-Davies

Consistency conditions for an AdS multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz correspondence

The Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (MERA) is a tensor network that provides an efficient way of variationally estimating the ground state of a critical quantum system. The network geometry resembles a discretization of spatial slices of an AdS spacetime and “geodesics” in the MERA reproduce the Ryu–Takayanagi formula for the entanglement entropy of a boundary region in terms of bulk properties. It has therefore been suggested that there could be an AdS/MERA correspondence, relating states in the Hilbert space of the boundary quantum system to ones defined on the bulk lattice. Here we investigate this proposal and derive necessary conditions for it to apply, using geometric features and entropy inequalities that we expect to hold in the bulk. We show that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the MERA lattice can only describe physics on length scales larger than the AdS radius. Further, using the covariant entropy bound in the bulk, we show that there are no conventional MERA parameters that completely reproduce bulk physics even on super-AdS scales. We suggest modifications or generalizations of this kind of tensor network that may be able to provide a more robust correspondence. ∗ ningbao@theory.caltech.edu, seancarroll@gmail.com, cjcao@caltech.edu, achatwin@caltech.edu, nickrhj@theory.caltech.edu, jpollack@caltech.edu, gremmen@theory.caltech.edu 1 ar X iv :1 50 4. 06 63 2v 1 [ he pth ] 2 4 A pr 2 01 5

A fully covariant information-theoretic ultraviolet cutoff for scalar fields in expanding Friedmann Robertson Walker spacetimes

While a natural ultraviolet cutoff, presumably at the Planck length, is widely assumed to exist in nature, it is nontrivial to implement a minimum length scale covariantly. This is because the presence of a fixed minimum length needs to be reconciled with the ability of Lorentz transformations to contract lengths. In this paper, we implement a fully covariant Planck scale cutoff by cutting off the spectrum of the d’Alembertian. In this scenario, consistent with Lorentz contractions, wavelengths that are arbitrarily smaller than the Planck length continue to exist. However, the dynamics of modes of wavelengths that are significantly smaller than the Planck length possess a very small bandwidth. This has the effect of freezing the dynamics of such modes. While both wavelengths and bandwidths are frame dependent, Lorentz contraction and time dilation conspire to make the freezing of modes of trans-Planckian wavelengths covariant. In particular, we show that this ultraviolet cutoff can be implemented covarian...

Specific mass shift measurements in rubidium by Doppler-free two-photon transitions

We measured the isotope shifts between Rb isotopes (86m, 86g, 81) and 87Rb for the 5S1/2 to 5D5/2 transition using the Doppler-free two-photon transition technique. By making a King plot, the difference between the specific mass shift constants of the 5S1/2 and 5D5/2 states is deduced to be 77(33) GHz amu. In addition, we measured the hyperfine constants of the 5D5/2 states in those three Rb isotopes, and we have determined an improved ground state hyperfine constant in 86mRb, A(5S1/2) = 563.04(5) MHz.

Natural Covariant Planck Scale Cutoffs and the Cosmic Microwave Background Spectrum

We calculate the impact of quantum gravity-motivated ultraviolet cutoffs on inflationary predictions for the cosmic microwave background spectrum. We model the ultraviolet cutoffs fully covariantly to avoid possible artifacts of covariance breaking. Imposing these covariant cutoffs results in the production of small, characteristically k-dependent oscillations in the spectrum. The size of the effect scales linearly with the ratio of the Planck to Hubble lengths during inflation. Consequently, the relative size of the effect could be as large as one part in 10^{5}; i.e., eventual observability may not be ruled out.

The complexity of identifying Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces in AdS3/CFT2

A bstractWe present a constructive algorithm for the determination of Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces in AdS3/CFT2 which exploits previously noted connections between holographic entanglement entropy and max-flow/min-cut. We then characterize its complexity as a polynomial time algorithm.

How to Recover a Qubit That Has Fallen into a Black Hole

We demonstrate an algorithm for the retrieval of a qubit, encoded in spin angular momentum, that has been dropped into a no-firewall black hole. Retrieval is achieved analogously to quantum teleportation by collecting Hawking radiation and performing measurements on the black hole. Importantly, these methods require only the ability to perform measurements from outside the event horizon.

Rescuing complementarity with little drama

A bstractThe AMPS paradox challenges black hole complementarity by apparently constructing a way for an observer to bring information from the outside of the black hole into its interior if there is no drama at its horizon, making manifest a violation of monogamy of entanglement. We propose a new resolution to the paradox: this violation cannot be explicitly checked by an infalling observer in the finite proper time they have to live after crossing the horizon. Our resolution depends on a weak relaxation of the no-drama condition (we call it “little-drama”) which is the “complementarity dual” of scrambling of information on the stretched horizon. When translated to the description of the black hole interior, this implies that the fine-grained quantum information of infalling matter is rapidly diffused across the entire interior while classical observables and coarse-grained geometry remain unaffected. Under the assumption that information has diffused throughout the interior, we consider the difficulty of the information-theoretic task that an observer must perform after crossing the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole in order to verify a violation of monogamy of entanglement. We find that the time required to complete a necessary subroutine of this task, namely the decoding of Bell pairs from the interior and the late radiation, takes longer than the maximum amount of time that an observer can spend inside the black hole before hitting the singularity. Therefore, an infalling observer cannot observe monogamy violation before encountering the singularity.

De Sitter Space as a Tensor Network: Cosmic No-Hair, Complementarity, and Complexity

We investigate the proposed connection between de Sitter spacetime and the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) tensor network, and ask what can be learned via such a construction. We show that the quantum state obeys a cosmic no-hair theorem: the reduced density operator describing a causal patch of the MERA asymptotes to a fixed point of a quantum channel, just as spacetimes with a positive cosmological constant asymptote to de Sitter space. The MERA is potentially compatible with a weak form of complementarity (local physics only describes single patches at a time, but the overall Hilbert space is infinite dimensional) or, with certain specific modifications to the tensor structure, a strong form (the entire theory describes only a single patch plus its horizon, in a finite-dimensional Hilbert space). We also suggest that de Sitter evolution has an interpretation in terms of circuit complexity, as has been conjectured for anti–de Sitter space.