Europe/Lisbon
Room P3.10, Mathematics Building — Online

Bartek Czech, Tsinghua University

Holographic Cone of Average Entropies and Universality of Black Holes

The holographic entropy cone, which identifies von Neumann entropies of CFT regions that are consistent with a semiclassical bulk dual, is currently known only up to $n=5$ regions. I explain that average entropies of $p$-partite subsystems can be checked for consistency with a semiclassical bulk dual far more easily, for an arbitrary number of regions $n$. This analysis defines the Holographic Cone of Average Entropies (HCAE). I conjecture the exact form of HCAE, and find that it has the following properties: (1) HCAE is the simplest it could be, namely it is a simplicial cone. (2) Its extremal rays represent stages of thermalization (black hole formation). (3) In a time-reversed picture, the extremal rays of HCAE represent stages of unitary black hole evaporation, as stipulated by the island solution of the black hole information paradox. (4) HCAE is bound by a novel, infinite family of holographic entropy inequalities. (5) HCAE is the simplest it could be also in its dependence on the number of regions n, namely its bounding inequalities are n-independent. (6) In a precise sense I describe, the bounding inequalities of HCAE unify (almost) all previously discovered holographic inequalities and strongly constrain future inequalities yet to be discovered. I also sketch an interpretation of HCAE in terms of error correction and the holographic Renormalization Group. The big lesson that HCAE seems to be teaching us is about the universality of black hole physics.