15–17 Jul 2026
Durham University
Europe/London timezone

Complexity and the Hilbert space dimension of 3D gravity

17 Jul 2026, 14:00
30m
Applebey Lecture Theatre (Geography) (Durham University)

Applebey Lecture Theatre (Geography)

Durham University

Speaker

Jonathan Karl (University of Würzburg)

Description

A central problem in formulating a theory of quantum gravity is to determine the size and structure of the Hilbert space of black holes. Here we use a quantum dynamical Krylov complexity approach to calculate the Hilbert space dimension of a black hole in 2+1-dimensional Anti-de Sitter space. We achieve this by obtaining the spread of an initial thermofield double state over the Krylov basis. The associated Lanczos coefficients match those for chaotic motion on the SL(2,R) group. By including non-perturbative effects in the path integral, which computes coarse-grained ensemble averages, we find that the complexity saturates at late times. The saturation value is given by the exponential of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. Our results introduce a new way to compute the Hilbert space dimension of complex interacting systems from the saturating value of spread complexity.

Authors

Prof. Herman Verlinde (Princeton University) Prof. Johanna Erdmenger (University of Würzburg) Jonathan Karl (University of Würzburg) Dr Rathindra Das (Weizmann Institute) Prof. Vijay Balasubramanian (University of Pennsylvania)

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