arXiv subjects

Yasunori Nomura

Publications and source records attributed to Yasunori Nomura.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Physical Predictions in Closed Quantum Gravity

Recent developments in gravitational path integrals indicate that the nonperturbative physical Hilbert space of a closed universe is one-dimensional within each superselection sector. This raises a basic puzzle: how can a unique quantum-gravity state give rise to semiclassical physics, measurement outcomes, and classical probabilities? In this paper, we develop a framework in which nontrivial and statistically stable predictions emerge despite the one-dimensionality of the fully constrained Hilbert space. The key idea is to extract physical predictions in an enlarged, unconstrained Hilbert space by conditioning on observational data. We show that partial observability -- reflecting the limited access of observers to the degrees of freedom of the universe -- suppresses ensemble fluctuations associated with microscopic structure in the gravitational path integral, thereby restoring semiclassical predictability with exponential accuracy. We formulate the construction explicitly including contributions from the Hartle--Hawking no-boundary state, define a gauge-invariant Hilbert space for observations via a density operator, and generalize the formalism to conditioning on histories, clarifying the emergence of classical probabilities and an effective arrow of time. Finally, we explore whether this framework can support a realistic cosmology and identify assumptions that the underlying theory of quantum gravity must satisfy.

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arXiv2026

Dark Matter as the Z_2 Partner of the Standard Model Higgs Boson

A possible gamma-ray excess from the Galactic halo favors dark matter with a mass of several hundred GeV. In previous work, we found that an electroweak scalar doublet is a particularly economical, and nearly uniquely selected, interpretation among simple renormalizable thermal dark-matter models. We point out that its unbroken Z_2 symmetry is exactly equivalent to an interchange symmetry between two Higgs doublets, making dark matter the Z_2-odd partner of the Standard Model Higgs boson and suggesting that the two doublets may share a common weak-scale origin. We connect this model to the recently reported 248 keV nuclear-recoil event in the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment. For dark-matter masses of 440--600 GeV, a technically natural, mass-dependent neutral-state splitting of order 350 keV defines a narrow strip near the kinematic boundary where the fixed off-diagonal Z interaction can produce the observed recoil. Because the scattering probes the extreme high-velocity tail of the Galactic distribution, this interpretation predicts a large annual modulation, with future events preferentially occurring around early summer. Neither observation is yet conclusive, but their common interpretation is sharply testable.

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arXiv2026

Electroweak Doublet Dark Matter for a Galactic Halo Gamma-Ray Excess

Weakly interacting massive particles provide a well-motivated framework for dark matter, naturally reproducing the observed relic abundance through thermal freeze-out. A recent claim of an indirect-detection signal from the Galactic halo, consistent with dark matter annihilation in the mass range 400--800 GeV, motivates a reexamination of minimal models that can account for such a signal while remaining consistent with existing constraints. In this paper, we analyze the simplest extensions of the Standard Model capable of explaining the signal. We show that electroweak doublet dark matter with Higgs-portal interactions provides a natural and economical explanation. The model predicts annihilation predominantly into gauge bosons with characteristic branching fractions and allows for inelastic dark matter with a mass splitting of order 100 keV, intriguingly consistent with a recent direct-detection anomaly. Possible enhancements of the present-day annihilation rate relative to the thermal value are also discussed, including a simple extension with a light scalar field that induces Sommerfeld enhancement.

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arXiv2026

Page transition for the complexity of an evaporating black hole

Recent results demonstrate that there exists a sharp, Page-like transition for the complexity of subsystems of Haar-random states as their fractional subsystem size surpasses one half. They further demonstrate that this transition also occurs for the holographic complexity of boundary subregions of eternal AdS black holes, assuming the Complexity$=$Volume (CV) proposal for subregions. We interpret this transition as a crossover from spectrum-dominated to basis-dominated subsystem complexity, reflecting the breakdown of approximate thermality beyond half-system size. We then apply this reasoning to an evaporating AdS black hole coupled to a bath, modeled by a quantum circuit undergoing random evolution on an interior subsystem of diminishing size. Using the basis-spectrum decomposition of subsystem complexity, we argue for a similar Page-like transition in the radiation complexity. We then show, using CV for subregions, that the same transition appears in the holographic complexity of the radiation subsystem through the emergence of an island, whose volume gives the dominant contribution. We argue that the island volume contribution resolves an apparent complexity paradox analogous to the information paradox.

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arXiv2025

Nonperturbative Quantum Gravity in a Closed Lorentzian Universe

We study how meaningful physical predictions can arise in nonperturbative quantum gravity in a closed Lorentzian universe. In such settings, recent developments suggest that the quantum gravitational Hilbert space is one-dimensional and real for each $α$-sector, as induced by spacetime wormholes. This appears to obstruct the conventional quantum-mechanical prescription of assigning probabilities via projection onto a basis of states. While previous approaches have introduced external observers or augmented the theory to resolve this issue, we argue that quantum gravity itself contains all the necessary ingredients to make physical predictions. We demonstrate that the emergence of classical observables and probabilistic outcomes can be understood as a consequence of partial observability: physical observers access only a subsystem of the universe. Tracing out the inaccessible degrees of freedom yields reduced density matrices that encode classical information, with uncertainties exponentially suppressed by the environment's entropy. We develop this perspective using both the Lorentzian path integral and operator formalisms and support it with a simple microscopic model. Our results show that quantum gravity in a closed universe naturally gives rise to meaningful, robust predictions without recourse to external constructs.

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arXiv2024

Firewalls at exponentially late times

We consider a version of the typical state firewall setup recently reintroduced by Stanford and Yang, who found that wormholes may create firewalls. We examine a late-time double scaling limit in JT gravity in which one can resum the expansion in the number of wormholes, and we use this to study the exact distribution of interior slices at times exponential in the entropy. We consider a thermofield double with and without early perturbations on a boundary. These perturbations can appear on interior slices as dangerous high energy shocks. For exponentially late times, wormholes tend to teleport the particles created by perturbations and render the interior more dangerous. In states with many perturbations separated by large times, the probability of a safe interior is exponentially small. Such states thus almost certainly have firewalls at the horizon, even though they would be safe without wormholes. With perturbation, even in the safest state we conceive, the odds of encountering a firewall are fifty-fifty. One interpretation of the phenomena found here is that wormholes can change time-ordered contours into effective out-of-time-ordered folds, making shockwaves appear in unexpected places.

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arXiv2024

Complementarity for a Dynamical Black Hole

Black hole complementarity posits that the interior of a black hole is not independent from its Hawking radiation. This leads to an apparent violation of causality: the interior can be acausally affected by operators acting solely on the radiation. We argue that this perspective is misleading and that the black hole interior must be viewed as existing in the causal past of the Hawking radiation, despite the fact that they are spacelike separated in the semiclassical description. Consequently, no operation on the Hawking radiation -- no matter how complex -- can affect the experience of an infalling observer. The black hole interior and the radiation only appear spacelike separated in the semiclassical description because an infalling observer's ability to access complex information is limited; the chaotic dynamics on the horizon, as viewed from the exterior, then converts any effect caused by such an observer to information in the Hawking radiation which cannot be accessed at the semiclassical level. We arrive at the picture described above by considering a unitary exterior description in which the flow of information is strictly causal, which we extend to apply throughout the entire history of black hole evolution, including its formation. This description uses the stretched event horizon as an inner edge of spacetime, on which the information inside is holographically encoded. We argue that the global spacetime picture arises from coarse-graining over black hole microstates, and discuss its relationship with the exterior description.

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arXiv2023

de Sitter space is sometimes not empty

Multiple lines of evidence suggest that the Hilbert space of an isolated de Sitter universe is one dimensional but can appear larger when probed by a gravitating observer. To test this idea, we compute the von Neumann entropy of a field theory in a two-dimensional de Sitter universe which is entangled in a thermal-like state with the same field theory on a disjoint, asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS) black hole. Previously, it was shown that the replica trick for computing the entropy of such entangled gravitating systems requires the inclusion of a non-perturbative effect in quantum gravity -- novel wormholes connecting the two spaces. Here we show that: (a) the expected wormholes connecting de Sitter and AdS universes exist, avoiding a no-go theorem via the presence of sources on the AdS boundary; (b) the entanglement entropy vanishes if the nominal entropy of the de Sitter cosmological horizon (S_dS = A_horizon^dS / 4G_N) is less than the entropy of the AdS black hole horizon (S_BH = A_horizon^AdS / 4G_N), i.e., S_dS < S_BH; (c) the entanglement entropy is finite when S_dS > S_BH. Thus, the de Sitter Hilbert space is effectively nontrivial only when S_dS > S_BH. The AdS black hole we introduce can be regarded as an ``observer'' for de Sitter space. In this sense, our result is a non-perturbative generalization of the recent perturbative argument that the algebra of observables on the de Sitter static patch becomes nontrivial in the presence of an observer.

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arXiv2022

Black Hole and de Sitter Microstructures from a Semiclassical Perspective

We describe two different, but equivalent semiclassical views of black hole physics in which the equivalence principle and unitarity are both accommodated. In one, unitarity is built-in, while the black hole interior emerges only effectively as a collective phenomenon involving horizon (and possibly other) degrees of freedom. In the other, more widely studied approach, the existence of the interior is manifest, while the unitarity of the underlying dynamics can be captured only indirectly by incorporating certain nonperturbative effects of gravity. These two pictures correspond to a distant description and the description based on entanglement islands/replica wormholes, respectively. We also present a holographic description of de Sitter spacetime based on the former approach, in which the holographic theory is located on the stretched horizon of a static patch. We argue that the existence of these two approaches is rooted in the two formulations of quantum mechanics: the canonical and path integral formalisms.

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arXiv2022

Pulling the Boundary into the Bulk

Motivated by the ability to consistently apply the Ryu-Takayanagi prescription for general convex surfaces and the relationship between entanglement and geometry in tensor networks, we introduce a novel, covariant bulk object - the holographic slice. The holographic slice is found by considering the continual removal of short range information in a boundary state. It thus provides a natural interpretation as the bulk dual of a series of coarse-grained holographic states. The slice possesses many desirable properties that provide consistency checks for its boundary interpretation. These include monotonicity of both area and entanglement entropy, uniqueness, and the inability to probe beyond late-time black hole horizons. Additionally, the holographic slice illuminates physics behind entanglement shadows, as minimal area extremal surfaces anchored to a coarse-grained boundary may probe entanglement shadows. This lets the slice flow through shadows. To aid in developing intuition for these slices, many explicit examples of holographic slices are investigated. Finally, the relationship to tensor networks and renormalization (particularly in AdS/CFT) is discussed.

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arXiv2021

The Multiverse in an Inverted Island

We study the redundancies in the global spacetime description of the eternally inflating multiverse using the quantum extremal surface prescription. We argue that a sufficiently large spatial region in a bubble universe has an entanglement island surrounding it. Consequently, the semiclassical physics of the multiverse, which is all we need to make cosmological predictions, can be fully described by the fundamental degrees of freedom associated with certain finite spatial regions. The island arises due to mandatory collisions with collapsing bubbles, whose big crunch singularities indicate redundancies of the global spacetime description. The emergence of the island and the resulting reduction of independent degrees of freedom provides a regularization of infinities which caused the cosmological measure problem.

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arXiv2021

An Information Paradox and Its Resolution in de Sitter Holography

We formulate a version of the information paradox in de Sitter spacetime and show that it is solved by the emergence of entanglement islands in the context of the DS/dS correspondence; in particular, the entanglement entropy of a subregion obeys a time-dependent Page curve. Our construction works in general spacetime dimensions and keeps the graviton massless. We interpret the resulting behavior of the entanglement entropy using double holography. It suggests that the spatial distribution of microscopic degrees of freedom depends on descriptions, as in the case of a black hole. In the static (distant) description of de Sitter (black hole) spacetime, these degrees of freedom represent microstates associated with the Gibbons-Hawking (Bekenstein-Hawking) entropy and are localized toward the horizon. On the other hand, in a global (effective two-sided) description, which is obtained by the quantum analog of analytic continuation and is intrinsically semiclassical, they are distributed uniformly and in a unique semiclassical de Sitter (black hole) vacuum state.

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arXiv2021

Black Hole Interior in Unitary Gauge Construction

A quantum system with a black hole accommodates two widely different, though physically equivalent, descriptions. In one description, based on global spacetime of general relativity, the existence of the interior region is manifest, while understanding unitarity requires nonperturbative quantum gravity effects such as replica wormholes. The other description adopts a manifestly unitary, or holographic, description, in which the interior emerges effectively as a collective phenomenon of fundamental degrees of freedom. In this paper we study the latter approach, which we refer to as the unitary gauge construction. In this picture, the formation of a black hole is signaled by the emergence of a surface (stretched horizon) possessing special dynamical properties: quantum chaos, fast scrambling, and low energy universality. These properties allow for constructing interior operators, as we do explicitly, without relying on details of microscopic physics. A key role is played by certain coarse modes in the zone region (hard modes), which determine the degrees of freedom relevant for the emergence of the interior. We study how the interior operators can or cannot be extended in the space of microstates and analyze irreducible errors associated with such extension. This reveals an intrinsic ambiguity of semiclassical theory formulated with a finite number of degrees of freedom. We provide an explicit prescription of calculating interior correlators in the effective theory, which describes only a finite region of spacetime. We study the issue of state dependence of interior operators in detail and discuss a connection of the resulting picture with the quantum error correction interpretation of holography.

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arXiv2020

From the Black Hole Conundrum to the Structure of Quantum Gravity

We portray the structure of quantum gravity emerging from recent progress in understanding the quantum mechanics of an evaporating black hole. Quantum gravity admits two different descriptions, based on Euclidean gravitational path integral and a unitarily evolving holographic quantum system, which appear to present vastly different pictures under the existence of a black hole. Nevertheless, these two descriptions are physically equivalent. Various issues of black hole physics---including the existence of the interior, unitarity of the evolution, the puzzle of too large interior volume, and the ensemble nature seen in certain calculations---are addressed very differently in the two descriptions, still leading to the same physical conclusions. The perspective of quantum gravity developed here is expected to have broader implications beyond black hole physics, especially for the cosmology of the eternally inflating multiverse.

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arXiv2020

Ensemble from Coarse Graining: Reconstructing the Interior of an Evaporating Black Hole

In understanding the quantum physics of a black hole, nonperturbative aspects of gravity play important roles. In particular, huge gauge redundancies of a gravitational theory at the nonperturbative level, which are much larger than the standard diffeomorphism and relate even spaces with different topologies, allow us to take different descriptions of a system. While the physical conclusions are the same in any description, the same physics may manifest itself in vastly different forms in descriptions based on different gauge choices. In this paper, we explore the relation between two such descriptions, which we refer to as the global gauge and unitary gauge constructions. The former is based on the global spacetime of general relativity, in which understanding unitarity requires the inclusion of subtle nonperturbative effects of gravity. The latter is based on a distant view of the black hole, in which unitarity is manifest but the existence of interior spacetime is obscured. These two descriptions are complementary. In this paper, we initiate the study of learning aspects of one construction through the analysis of the other. We find that the existence of near empty interior spacetime manifest in the global gauge construction is related to the maximally chaotic, fast scrambling, and universal dynamics of the horizon in the unitary gauge construction. We use the complementarity of the gauge choices to understand the ensemble nature of the gravitational path integral in global spacetime in terms of coarse graining and thermality in a single unitary theory that does not involve any ensemble nature at the fundamental level. We also discuss how the interior degrees of freedom are related with those in the exterior in the two constructions. This relation emerges most naturally as entanglement wedge reconstruction and the effective theory of the interior in the respective constructions.

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arXiv2020

Coarse-Graining Holographic States: A Semiclassical Flow in General Spacetimes

Motivated by the understanding of holography as realized in tensor networks, we develop a bulk procedure that can be interpreted as generating a sequence of coarse-grained holographic states. The coarse-graining procedure involves identifying degrees of freedom entangled at short distances and disentangling them. This is manifested in the bulk by a flow equation that generates a codimension-1 object, which we refer to as the holographic slice. We generalize the earlier classical construction to include bulk quantum corrections, which naturally involves the generalized entropy as a measure of the number of relevant boundary degrees of freedom. The semiclassical coarse-graining results in a flow that approaches quantum extremal surfaces such as entanglement islands that have appeared in discussions of the black hole information paradox. We also discuss the relation of the present picture to the view that the holographic dictionary works as quantum error correction.

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arXiv2020

The Interior of a Unitarily Evaporating Black Hole

We study microscopic operators describing the experience of an observer falling into the horizon of a unitarily evaporating black hole. For a young black hole, these operators can be taken to act only on the degrees of freedom in the black hole region: the soft---or stretched horizon---modes as well as the semiclassical modes in the zone region. On the other hand, for an old black hole, the operators must also involve radiation emitted earlier; the difference between the two cases comes from statistics associated with the coarse-graining performed to obtain the effective theory of the interior. We find that the operators relevant for the interior theory can be defined globally as standard linear operators throughout the microstates, which obey the correct algebra up to corrections exponentially suppressed in the ratio of excitation energy to the Hawking temperature. We conjecture that the existence of such global operators is required for the emergence of the semiclassical picture. We also elucidate relation between the present construction and entanglement wedge reconstruction of the interior.

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arXiv2020

Spacetime and Universal Soft Modes --- Black Holes and Beyond

Recently, a coherent picture of the quantum mechanics of an evaporating black hole has been presented which reconciles unitarity with the predictions of the equivalence principle. The thermal nature of a black hole as viewed in a distant reference frame arises from entanglement between the hard and soft modes, generated by the chaotic dynamics at the string scale. In this paper, we elaborate on this picture, particularly emphasizing the importance of the chaotic nature of the string (UV) dynamics across all low energy species in generating large (IR) spacetime behind the horizon. Implications of this UV/IR relation include O(1) breaking of global symmetries at the string scale and a self-repair mechanism of black holes restoring the smoothness of their horizons. We also generalize the framework to other systems, including Rindler, de Sitter, and asymptotically flat spacetimes, and find a consistent picture in each case. Finally, we discuss the origin of the particular construction adopted in describing the black hole interior as well as the outside of a de Sitter horizon. We argue that the construction is selected by the quantum-to-classical transition, in particular the applicability of the Born rule in a quantum mechanical world.

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