Complexity and the bulk volume, a new York time story

Abstract

We study the boundary description of the volume of maximal Cauchy slices using the recently derived equivalence between bulk and boundary symplectic forms. The volume of constant mean curvature slices is known to be canonically conjugate to "York time". We use this to construct the boundary deformation that is conjugate to the volume in a handful of examples, such as empty AdS, a backreacting scalar condensate, or the thermofield double at infinite time. We propose a possible natural boundary interpretation for this deformation and use it to motivate a concrete version of the complexity=volume conjecture, where the boundary complexity is defined as the energy of geodesics in the Kähler geometry of half sided sources. We check this conjecture for Bañados geometries and a mini-superspace version of the thermofield double state. Finally, we show that the precise dual of the quantum information metric for marginal scalars is given by a particularly simple symplectic flux, instead of the volume as previously conjectured.