arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Ahmed Almheiri.
We develop models of 1+1 dimensional dilaton gravity describing flows to $AdS_2$ from higher dimensional $AdS$ and other spaces. We use these to study the effects of backreaction on holographic correlators. We show that this scales as a relevant effect at low energies, for compact transverse spaces. We also discuss effects of matter loops, as in the CGHS model.
We point out a connection between the emergence of bulk locality in AdS/CFT and the theory of quantum error correction. Bulk notions such as Bogoliubov transformations, location in the radial direction, and the holographic entropy bound all have natural CFT interpretations in the language of quantum error correction. We also show that the question of whether bulk operator reconstruction works only in the causal wedge or all the way to the extremal surface is related to the question of whether or not the quantum error correcting code realized by AdS/CFT is also a "quantum secret sharing scheme", and suggest a tensor network calculation that may settle the issue. Interestingly, the version of quantum error correction which is best suited to our analysis is the somewhat nonstandard "operator algebra quantum error correction" of Beny, Kempf, and Kribs. Our proposal gives a precise formulation of the idea of "subregion-subregion" duality in AdS/CFT, and clarifies the limits of its validity.
We investigate the possibility of firewalls in the Einstein-dilaton gravity model of CGHS. We use the results of the numerical simulation carried out by Ashtekar et al. to demonstrate that firewalls are absent and the horizon is drama free. We show that the lack of a firewall is consistent because the model does not satisfy one of the postulates of black hole complementarity. In particular, we show that the Hawking radiation is not pure, and is completely entangled with a long-lived remnant beyond the last ray.
We address proposed alternatives to the black hole firewall. We show that embedding the interior Hilbert space of an old black hole into the Hilbert space of the early radiation is inconsistent, as is embedding the semi-classical interior of an AdS black hole into any dual CFT Hilbert space. We develop the use of large AdS black holes as a system to sharpen the firewall argument. We also reiterate arguments that unitary non-local theories can avoid firewalls only if the non-localities are suitably dramatic.
We argue that the following three statements cannot all be true: (i) Hawking radiation is in a pure state, (ii) the information carried by the radiation is emitted from the region near the horizon, with low energy effective field theory valid beyond some microscopic distance from the horizon, and (iii) the infalling observer encounters nothing unusual at the horizon. Perhaps the most conservative resolution is that the infalling observer burns up at the horizon. Alternatives would seem to require novel dynamics that nevertheless cause notable violations of semiclassical physics at macroscopic distances from the horizon.
We investigate an AdS2 magnetic brane solution within an abelian truncation of gauged supergravity in AdS4 x orbifolded S7. The solutions flow from AdS4 -> AdS2 x R2 with a magnetic field orthogonal to the R2 directions. We find a class of supersymmetric solutions of the bulk theory to assure stability. We find the remarkable result that there exists a finite zero temperature entropy at both strong and weak coupling.