Non-isometric codes and effective field theory in the black hole interior

by Shreya Vardhan

Tuesday 20 Sept 2022, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

I will argue that recent derivations of the Page curve for evaporating black holes using the quantum extremal surface formula tell us that the bulk-to-boundary map at late times must be non-isometric. This implies that a large set of states in the effective field theory Hilbert space of the black hole interior do not exist in the fundamental description of the system. Despite this, I will show using a simple model that several features of the effective field theory can be approximately preserved in the fundamental theory, as long as we restrict to states and operators whose complexity is sub-exponential in the black hole entropy.