Learning the Alpha-bits of Black Holes

Abstract

When the bulk geometry in AdS/CFT contains a black hole, the boundary reconstruction of a given bulk operator will often necessarily depend on the choice of black hole microstate, an example of state dependence. As a result, whether a given bulk operator can be reconstructed on the boundary at all can depend on whether the black hole is described by a pure state or thermal ensemble. We refine this dichotomy, demonstrating that the same boundary operator can often be used for large subspaces of black hole microstates, corresponding to a constant fraction $\alpha$ of the black hole entropy. In the Schrodinger picture, the boundary subregion encodes the $\alpha$-bits (a concept from quantum information) of a bulk region containing the black hole and bounded by extremal surfaces. These results have important consequences for the structure of AdS/CFT and for quantum information. Firstly, they imply that the bulk reconstruction is necessarily only approximate and allow us to place non-perturbative lower bounds on the error when doing so. Second, they provide a simple and tractable limit in which the entanglement wedge is state-dependent, but in a highly controlled way. Although the state dependence of operators comes from ordinary quantum error correction, there are clear connections to the Papadodimas-Raju proposal for understanding operators behind black hole horizons. In tensor network toy models of AdS/CFT, we see how state dependence arises from the bulk operator being `pushed' through the black hole itself. Finally, we show that black holes provide the first `explicit' examples of capacity-achieving $\alpha$-bit codes. Unintuitively, Hawking radiation always reveals the $\alpha$-bits of a black hole as soon as possible. In an appendix, we apply a result from the quantum information literature to prove that entanglement wedge reconstruction can be made exact to all orders in $1/N$.