Speaker
Description
Quantum information provides new ways of thinking about gravity. I’ll first describe our work on black holes viewed as fast “scramblers” of information: if a black hole mixes its internal information very quickly, then someone falling in would encounter a high-energy barrier (a “firewall”) almost immediately, rather than passing smoothly through the horizon as Einstein’s theory suggests, and that every astrophysical black hole in the universe will already have a fully developed firewall. Turning to cosmology, we use a simple measure of how “complicated” the tiny patterns of matter and energy become as the Universe expands. During the rapid growth phase of the early Universe, this complexity increases steadily, but in later eras it drops and eventually stops changing. We also find a maximum rate at which this complexity can grow, with the inflationary period reaching that limit. These results show how ideas from information theory can shed light on both black holes and cosmic evolution.
References:
A. Bhattacharyya, S. Das, S. Haque, B. Underwood, Phys. Rev. D 101, 106020 (2020); Phys. Rev. Research 2, 033273 (2020).
Z-W. Wang, S Das, S. L. Braunstein, arXiv:2206.02053.