arXiv subjects

Simon F. Ross

Publications and source records attributed to Simon F. Ross.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Constraints on four-party entanglement in holography

We show that in pure time-reflection-symmetric holographic states several known four-party entanglement signals vanish unless the triple information $I_3$ is non-zero. In this sense, our results show that $I_3$ is the strongest known signal of the presence of quadripartite entanglement. Additionally, $I_3$ quantitatively bounds all four-party entanglement signals built from the multi-entropy. However, the residual entropy $Q_4$, also a measure of four-party entanglement, is not bounded by $I_3$, although $I_3=0$ does imply $Q_4=0$ for holographic states (except on a set of measure zero for which $Q_4$ is ill-defined).

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arXiv2026

Quantum Solitons

We construct geometries describing the quantum backreaction of thermal fields in AdS$_3$. The solutions are obtained from branes in a four-dimensional AdS C-metric. They can be viewed as solutions of the semiclassical effective theory on the brane, which couples three-dimensional gravity to the CFT dual to the four-dimensional bulk. This brane construction is related by a double analytic continuation to earlier studies of quantum BTZ solutions. There are two families of solutions, labelled by the asymptotic mass. Solutions with negative mass correspond to the back-reaction of a thermal CFT state on global AdS$_3$. Solutions with positive mass have a horizon for zero back-reaction, which is replaced by a smooth origin in the back-reacted solution. We study the thermodynamics and first law on the brane, which we argue is realised in a two-brane setup where we include both the quantum BTZ brane and our quantum soliton brane.

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arXiv2025

Time Evolution of Multi-Party Entanglement Signals

We study the real-time dynamics of multi-party entanglement signals in chaotic quantum many-body systems including but not necessarily restricted to holographic conformal field theories. We find that scrambling dynamics generates multiparty entanglement with rich structure including: (a) qualitatively different dynamical behaviours for different signals, likely reflecting different dynamics for different kinds of entanglement patterns, (b) discontinuities indicating dynamical phase transitions in the entanglement structure, (c) transient and non-monotonic multiparty entanglement, and (d) periods during which the extensive entanglement of some regions is entirely multipartite. Our main technical tool is the membrane theory of entanglement dynamics.

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arXiv2025

Purely GHZ-like entanglement is forbidden in holography

We provide evidence that three-party entanglement signals in holography obey a relation that is not satisfied by generalized Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states. Using proposed holographic duals for these entanglement signals, we provide a geometric argument establishing this relation. This is the first known inequality on the structure of pure three-party holographic states, and shows that time-symmetric holographic states can never have purely GHZ-like entanglement. We also discuss similar relations for four parties.

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arXiv2025

The spectrum of pure dS$_3$ gravity in the static patch

We consider the quantum mechanical description of the de Sitter static patch in three-dimensional general relativity. We consider a Lorentzian path integral that conjecturally computes the Fourier transform of the spectrum of the static patch Hamiltonian. We regulate a saddle point for this integral by a complex deformation that connects it to future infinity. Our computation is thus closely connected with the wave function of de Sitter gravity on a torus at future infinity. Motivated by this, we identify an infinite number of saddle points that contribute to our Lorentzian path integral. Their sum gives a surprisingly simple result, which agrees with the expected features of the de Sitter static patch. For example, the thermal entropy, evaluated at the de Sitter temperature, agrees with the Bekenstein-Hawking formula. We also obtain a spectrum in the spin-zero sector, which is bounded, discrete, and has an integer degeneracy of states. It includes a dense spectrum of states, making both positive and negative contributions to the trace, arranged in such a way that negative contributions are invisible in the computation of any smooth observable. Nevertheless, several mysteries remain.

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arXiv2025

Cosmology inside a black hole: adding matter on the brane

Braneworlds inside an AdS black hole provide simple models where a closed cosmology can be encoded in a dual field theory. Previous studies have focused on pure-tension branes, where the only matter in the cosmology is that dual to the holographic bulk. We consider models with additional explicit matter fields on the brane. Both for perfect fluid matter and for an axion field on the brane, we show that this can avoid a self-intersection problem in the Euclidean construction of such geometries in higher dimensions.

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arXiv2024

Signals of multiparty entanglement and holography

We study multiparty entanglement signals, which are functions of a quantum state that are non-zero only when the state has multiparty entanglement. We consider known signals of three- and four-party entanglement, and propose new signals for four- and higher-party entanglement. We make some remarks on their general properties, but mainly focus on using holographic states in AdS$_3/$CFT$_2$ as a test case to explore their properties. For both the AdS vacuum and multiboundary wormhole states, we find that the multiparty entanglement signals are generically non-zero and of order one in units of the central charge of the dual CFT, revealing substantial multiparty entanglement. In the large-horizon limit of multiboundary wormhole states, however, the signals for three or more parties become small indicating the short-range nature of entanglement.

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arXiv2024

A new observable for holographic cosmology

The double-cone geometry is a saddle of the gravitational path integral, which explains the chaotic statistics of the spectrum of black hole microstates. This geometry is the usual AdS-Schwarzschild black hole, but with a periodic identification of the time coordinate; the resulting singularity at the black hole horizon is regulated by making the geometry slightly complex. Here, we consider generalizations of the double-cone geometry which include the Lorentzian cosmology that sits between the event horizon and the black hole singularity. We analyze this in two and three dimensions, where the cosmology has compact spatial sections and big bang/crunch singularities. These singularities are regulated in the same way by slightly complexifying the metric. We show that this is possible while satisfying the Kontsevich-Segal criterion, implying that these geometries can be interpreted as perturbatively stable saddle points in general relativity. This procedure leads to a novel description of the cosmology in terms of standard observables in the dual boundary CFT. In three dimensions, the cosmological solution gives a new contribution to the two-point function of the density of states in the boundary CFT. Unlike the usual double cone, it describes correlations between black hole microstates with different masses, and in a limit describes correlations between the statistics of heavy states and states near the BTZ threshold.

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arXiv2022

Cosmologies inside hyperbolic black holes

Models with closed FRW cosmologies on the worldvolume of a constant-tension brane inside a black hole provide an interesting setup for studying cosmology holographically. However, in more than two worldvolume dimensions, there are limitations on such models with flat spatial slices. I show that these limitations can be avoided by considering instead hyperbolic slices. This also naturally makes contact with previous work on Euclidean wormholes.

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arXiv2022

Constraints on cosmologies inside black holes

We study the construction of holographic models with closed FRW cosmologies on the worldvolume of a constant-tension brane inside a Schwarzschild-AdS black hole. In dimensions d>2, having a smooth Euclidean solution where the brane does not self-intersect limits the brane tension to T<T_*, preventing us from realising a separation of scales between the brane and bulk curvature scales. We show that adding interface branes to this model does not relax the condition on the brane tension.

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arXiv2022

Going beyond ER=EPR in the SYK model

We discuss generalizations of the TFD to a density matrix on the doubled Hilbert space. We suggest that a semiclassical wormhole corresponds to a certain class of such density matrices, and specify how they are constructed. Different semi-classical profiles correspond to different non-overlapping density matrices. We show that this language allows for a finer criteria for when the wormhole is semiclassical, which goes beyond entanglement. Our main tool is the SYK model. We focus on the simplest class of such density matrices, in a scaling limit where the ER bridge is captured by chords going from one space to another, encoding correlations in the microscopic Hamiltonian. The length of the wormhole simply encodes the extent these correlations are eroded when flowing from one side to the other.

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arXiv2021

Towards traversable wormholes from force-free plasmas

The near-horizon region of magnetically charged black holes can have very strong magnetic fields. A useful low-energy effective theory for fluctuations of the fields, coupled to electrically charged particles, is force-free electrodynamics. The low energy collective excitations include a large number of Alfven wave modes, which have a massless dispersion relation along the field worldlines. We attempt to construct traversable wormhole solutions using the negative Casimir energy of the Alfven wave modes, analogously to the recent construction using charged massless fermions. The behaviour of massless scalars in the near-horizon region implies that the size of the wormholes is strongly restricted and cannot be made large, even though the force free description is valid in a larger regime.

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arXiv2021

Islands and mixed states in closed universes

We investigate the appearance of islands when a closed universe with gravity is entangled with a non-gravitating quantum system. We use braneworlds in three-dimensional multiboundary wormhole geometries as a model to explore what happens when the non-gravitating system has several components. The braneworld can be either completely contained in the entanglement wedge of one of the non-gravitating systems or split between them. In the former case, entanglement with the other system leads to a mixed state in the closed universe, unlike in simpler setups with a single quantum system, where the closed universe was necessarily in a pure state. We show that the entropy of this mixed state is bounded by half of the coarse-grained entropy of the effective theory on the braneworld.

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arXiv2021

Supersymmetric solitons and a degeneracy of solutions in AdS/CFT

We study Lorentzian supersymmetric configurations in $D=4$ and $D=5$ gauged $\mathcal{N}=2$ supergravity. We show that there are smooth $1/2$ BPS solutions which are asymptotically AdS$_{4}$ and AdS$_{5}$ with a planar boundary, a compact spacelike direction and with a Wilson line on that circle. There are solitons where the $S^{1}$ shrinks smoothly to zero in the interior, with a magnetic flux through the circle determined by the Wilson line, which are AdS analogues of the Melvin fluxtube. There is also a solution with a constant gauge field, which is pure AdS. Both solutions preserve half of the supersymmetries at a special value of the Wilson line. There is a phase transition between these two saddle-points as a function of the Wilson line precisely at the supersymmetric point. Thus, the supersymmetric solutions are degenerate, at least at the supergravity level. We extend this discussion to one of the Romans solutions in four dimensions when the Euclidean boundary is $S^{1}\timesΣ_{g}$ where $Σ_{g}$ is a Riemann surface with genus $g > 0$. We speculate that the supersymmetric state of the CFT on the boundary is dual to a superposition of the two degenerate geometries.

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arXiv2020

Making near-extremal wormholes traversable

We construct a traversable wormhole from a charged AdS black hole by adding a coupling between the two boundary theories. We investigate how the effect of this deformation behaves in the extremal limit of the black hole. The black holes have finite entropy but an infinitely long throat in the extremal limit. We argue that it is still possible to make the throat traversable even in the extremal limit, but this requires either tuning the field for which we add a boundary coupling close to an instability threshold or scaling the strength of the coupling inversely with the temperature. In the latter case we show that the amount of information that can be sent through the wormhole scales with the entropy.

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arXiv2020

Spin structures and baby universes

We extend a 2d topological model of the gravitational path integral to include sums over spin structure, corresponding to Neveu-Schwarz (NS) or Ramond (R) boundary conditions for fermions. The Euclidean path integral vanishes when the number of R boundaries is odd. This path integral corresponds to a correlator of boundary creation operators on a non-trivial baby universe Hilbert space. The non-factorization necessitates a dual interpretation of the bulk path integral in terms of a product of partition functions (associated to NS boundaries) and Witten indices (associated to R boundaries), averaged over an ensemble of theories with varying Hilbert space dimension and different numbers of bosonic and fermionic states. We also consider a model with End-of-the-World (EOW) branes: the dual ensemble then includes a sum over randomly chosen fermionic and bosonic states. We propose two modifications of the bulk path integral which restore an interpretation in a single dual theory: (i) a geometric prescription where we add extra boundaries with a sum over their spin structures, and (ii) an algebraic prescription involving "spacetime D-branes". We extend our ideas to Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity, and propose a dual description of a single unitary theory with spin structure in a system with eigenbranes.

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arXiv2019

Complexity and typical microstates

Typical black hole microstates in AdS/CFT were recently conjectured to have a geometrical dual with a smooth horizon and a portion of a second asymptotic region. I consider the application of the holographic complexity conjectures to this geometry. The holographic calculation leads to divergent values for the complexity; I argue that this classical divergence is consistent with expectations for typical microstates.

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arXiv2018

Generalized Gibbs Ensemble and the Statistics of KdV Charges in 2D CFT

Two-dimensional CFTs have an infinite set of commuting conserved charges, known as the quantum KdV charges. We study the Generalized Gibbs Ensemble with chemical potentials for these charges at high temperature. In a large central charge limit, the partition function can be computed in a saddle-point approximation. We compare the ensemble values of the KdV charges to the values in a microstate, and find that they match irrespective of the values of the chemical potentials. We study the partition function at finite central charge perturbatively in the chemical potentials, and find that this degeneracy is broken. We also study the statistics of the KdV charges at high level within a Virasoro representation, and find that they are sharply peaked.

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