Theory HEP Seminar

Comments on entanglement and meeting in the black hole interior

Alex May

Perimeter Institute

A strange feature of two sided black hole solutions is the ability of observers, who jump in from opposite asymptotic regions, to meet in the black hole interior and interact. In the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, we offer some perspectives from quantum information theory on this observation. First, we argue that at least in 2+1 dimensional black holes, and when they happen early enough in the interior, interior interactions can be understood in terms “non-local quantum computation”, a process that involves replacing interaction with entanglement and a limited pattern of communication. This leads to a signature of these early interior interactions in the entanglement between the dual CFTs. Second, we discuss a conjecture aimed at better understanding the late interior of the black hole. The conjecture posits that large correlations between CFT subregions in opposite asymptotic regions should imply the existence of points in the common past of the two subregions. We verify this in the case of a shockwave geometry and discuss its motivation in terms of the “common cause principle” in probability theory.