Emergent Geometry Research Articles

Quantum gravity of the Heisenberg algebra

We consider a simplified model of double scaled SYK (DSSYK) in which the Hamiltonian is the position operator of the Harmonic oscillator. This model captures the high temperature limit of DSSYK but could also be defined as a quantum theory in its own right. We study properties of the emergent geometry including its dynamics in response to inserting matter particles. In particular, we find that the model displays de Sitter-like properties such as that infalling matter reduces the rate of growth of geodesic slices between the two boundaries. The simplicity of the model allows us to compute the full generating functional for correlation functions of the length mode or any number of matter operators. We provide evidence that the effective action of the geodesic length between boundary points is non-local. Furthermore, we use the on-shell solution for the geodesic lengths between any two boundary points to reconstruct an effective bulk metric and reverse engineer the dilaton gravity theory that generates this metric as a solution.

Black hole bulk-cone singularities

Lorentzian correlators of local operators exhibit surprising singularities in theories with gravity duals. These are associated with null geodesics in an emergent bulk geometry. We analyze singularities of the thermal response function dual to propagation of waves on the AdS Schwarzschild black hole background. We derive the analytic form of the leading singularity dual to a bulk geodesic that winds around the black hole. Remarkably, it exhibits a boundary group velocity larger than the speed of light, whose dual is the angular velocity of null geodesics at the photon sphere. The strength of the singularity is controlled by the classical Lyapunov exponent associated with the instability of nearly bound photon orbits. In this sense, the bulk-cone singularity can be identified as the universal feature that encodes the ubiquitous black hole photon sphere in a dual holographic CFT. To perform the computation analytically, we express the two-point correlator as an infinite sum over Regge poles, and then evaluate this sum using WKB methods. We also compute the smeared correlator numerically, which in particular allows us to check and support our analytic predictions. We comment on the resolution of black hole bulk-cone singularities by stringy and gravitational effects into black hole bulk-cone “bumps”. We conclude that these bumps are robust, and could serve as a target for simulations of black hole-like geometries in table-top experiments.

Fidelity of wormhole teleportation in finite-qubit systems

The rapid development of quantum science and technology is leading us into an era where quantum many-body systems can be comprehended through quantum simulations. Holographic duality, which states gravity and spacetime can emerge from strongly interacting systems, then offers a natural avenue for the experimental study of gravity physics without delving into experimentally infeasible high energies. A prominent example is the simulation of traversable wormholes through the wormhole teleportation protocol, attracting both theoretical and experimental attention. In this work, we develop the theoretical framework for computing the fidelity of wormhole teleportation in N-qubit systems with all-to-all interactions, quantified by mutual information and entanglement negativity. The main technique is the scramblon effective theory, which captures universal out-of-time-order correlations in generic chaotic systems. We clarify that strong couplings between the two systems are essential for simulating the probe limit of semi-classical traversable wormholes using strongly interacting systems with near-maximal chaos. However, the teleportation signal diminishes rapidly when reducing the system size N, requiring a large number of qubits to observe a sharp signature of emergent geometry by simulating the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. This includes both the causal time-order of signals and the asymmetry of the teleportation signal for coupling with different signs. As a comparison, the teleportation signal increases when reducing N in weakly interacting systems. We also analyze the fidelity of the generalized encoding scheme in fermionic string operators.

Polynomial Equivalence of Complexity Geometries

This paper proves the polynomial equivalence of a broad class of definitions of quantum computational complexity. We study right-invariant metrics on the unitary group—often called `complexity geometries' following the definition of quantum complexity proposed by Nielsen—and delineate the equivalence class of metrics that have the same computational power as quantum circuits. Within this universality class, any unitary that can be reached in one metric can be approximated in any other metric in the class with a slowdown that is at-worst polynomial in the length and number of qubits and inverse-polynomial in the permitted error. We describe the equivalence classes for two different kinds of error we might tolerate: Killing-distance error, and operator-norm error. All metrics in both equivalence classes are shown to have exponential diameter; all metrics in the operator-norm equivalence class are also shown to give an alternative definition of the quantum complexity class BQP. My results extend those of Nielsen et al., who in 2006 proved that one particular metric is polynomially equivalent to quantum circuits. The Nielsen et al. metric is incredibly highly curved. I show that the greatly enlarged equivalence class established in this paper also includes metrics that have modest curvature. I argue that the modest curvature makes these metrics more amenable to the tools of differential geometry, and therefore makes them more promising starting points for Nielsen's program of using differential geometry to prove complexity lowerbounds. In a previous paper my collaborators and I—inspired by the UV/IR decoupling that happens in the phenomenon of renormalization—conjectured that high- dimensional metrics that look very different at short scales will often nevertheless give rise at long scales to the same emergent effective geometry. The results of this paper provide evidence for those conjectures, since many complexity metrics that have radically different penalty factors and therefore radically different short- distance properties are shown to belong to the same long-distance equivalence class.

Emergent neural dynamics and geometry for generalization in a transitive inference task.

Relational cognition-the ability to infer relationships that generalize to novel combinations of objects-is fundamental to human and animal intelligence. Despite this importance, it remains unclear how relational cognition is implemented in the brain due in part to a lack of hypotheses and predictions at the levels of collective neural activity and behavior. Here we discovered, analyzed, and experimentally tested neural networks (NNs) that perform transitive inference (TI), a classic relational task (if A > B and B > C, then A > C). We found NNs that (i) generalized perfectly, despite lacking overt transitive structure prior to training, (ii) generalized when the task required working memory (WM), a capacity thought to be essential to inference in the brain, (iii) emergently expressed behaviors long observed in living subjects, in addition to a novel order-dependent behavior, and (iv) expressed different task solutions yielding alternative behavioral and neural predictions. Further, in a large-scale experiment, we found that human subjects performing WM-based TI showed behavior inconsistent with a class of NNs that characteristically expressed an intuitive task solution. These findings provide neural insights into a classical relational ability, with wider implications for how the brain realizes relational cognition.

Local prediction-learning in high-dimensional spaces enables neural networks to plan

Planning and problem solving are cornerstones of higher brain function. But we do not know how the brain does that. We show that learning of a suitable cognitive map of the problem space suffices. Furthermore, this can be reduced to learning to predict the next observation through local synaptic plasticity. Importantly, the resulting cognitive map encodes relations between actions and observations, and its emergent high-dimensional geometry provides a sense of direction for reaching distant goals. This quasi-Euclidean sense of direction provides a simple heuristic for online planning that works almost as well as the best offline planning algorithms from AI. If the problem space is a physical space, this method automatically extracts structural regularities from the sequence of observations that it receives so that it can generalize to unseen parts. This speeds up learning of navigation in 2D mazes and the locomotion with complex actuator systems, such as legged bodies. The cognitive map learner that we propose does not require a teacher, similar to self-attention networks (Transformers). But in contrast to Transformers, it does not require backpropagation of errors or very large datasets for learning. Hence it provides a blue-print for future energy-efficient neuromorphic hardware that acquires advanced cognitive capabilities through autonomous on-chip learning.

Spacetime topology from holographic entanglement

An asymptotically AdS geometry connecting two or more boundaries is given by a entangled state, that can be expanded in the product basis of the Hilbert spaces of each CFT living on the boundaries. We derive a prescription to compute this expansion for states describing spacetimes with general spatial topology in arbitrary dimension. To large N, the expansion coincides with the Schmidt decomposition and the coefficients are given by n-point correlation functions on a particular Euclidean geometry.We show that this applies to all spacetime that admits a Hartle-Hawking type of wave functional, which via a standard hypothesis on the spatial topology, can be (one to one) mapped to CFT states defined on the asymptotic boundary. It is also observed that these states are endowed with quantum coherence properties.Applying this as holographic engineering, one can to construct an emergent space geometry with certain predetermined topology by preparing an entangled state of the dual quantum system. As an example, we apply the method to calculate the expansion and characterize a spacetime whose initial spatial topology is a (genus one) handlebody.

Emergent geometry, torsion and anomalies in non-relativistic topological matter

I review and discuss aspects of the interplay of emergent geometry and anomalies in topological semimetals and insulators, focusing on effects of torsion. This correspondence identifies torsional topological responses in terms of anomalies and anomaly related hydrodynamic phenomena involving gauge fields and geometry. I discuss how torsional emergent geometry arises from elastic deformations in crystalline materials and how this background couples to thee low-energy continuum models inherited from lattice models, utilizing the semiclassical expansion. Via the coupling of momentum space topology and emergent vielbein geometry, non-relativistic topological matter can realise new geometrical responses of mixed gauge-gravitational character. The topological low-energy torsional responses depend momentum space geometry, lattice momenta and the regularization and UV completion, provided by the non-relativistic physics and symmetries of topological materials.

Emergent area laws from entangled matrices

We consider a wavefunction of large N matrices supported close to an emergent classical fuzzy sphere geometry. The SU(N) Gauss law of the theory enforces correlations between the matrix degrees of freedom associated to a geometric subregion and their complement. We call this ‘Gauss law entanglement’. We show that the subregion degrees of freedom transform under a single dominant, low rank representation of SU(N). The corresponding Gauss law entanglement entropy is given by the logarithm of the dimension of this dominant representation. It is found that, after coarse-graining in momentum space, the SU(N) Gauss law entanglement entropy is proportional to the geometric area bounding the subregion. The constant of proportionality goes like the inverse of an emergent Maxwell coupling constant, reminiscent of gravitational entropy.

Gravidynamics, spinodynamics and electrodynamics within the framework of gravitational quantum field theory

By noticing the fact that the charged leptons and quarks in the standard model are chirality-based Dirac spinors since their weak interaction violates maximally parity symmetry though they behave as Dirac fermions in electromagnetic interaction, we show that such a chirality-based Dirac spinor possesses not only electric charge gauge symmetry U(1) but also inhomogeneous spin gauge symmetry WS(1,3) = SP(1,3)$\rtimes$W$^{1,3}$, which reveals the nature of gravity and spacetime. The gravitational force and spin gauge force are governed by the gauge symmetries $W^{1,3}$ and SP(1,3), respectively, and a biframe spacetime with globally flat Minkowski spacetime as base spacetime and locally flat gravigauge spacetime as a fiber is described by the gravigauge field through emergent non-commutative geometry. The gauge-geometry duality and renormalizability in gravitational quantum field theory (GQFT) are carefully discussed. A detailed analysis and systematic investigation on gravidynamics and spinodynamics as well as electrodynamics are carried out within the framework of GQFT. A full discussion on the generalized Dirac equation and Maxwell equation as well as Einstein equation and spin gauge equation is made in biframe spacetime. New effects of gravidynamics as extension of general relativity are particularly analyzed. All dynamic equations of basic fields are demonstrated to preserve the spin gauge covariance and general coordinate covariance due to the spin gauge symmetry and emergent general linear group symmetry GL(1,3,R), so they hold naturally in any spinning reference frame and motional reference frame.

Local Microtubule and F-Actin Distributions Fully Constrain the Spatial Geometry of Drosophila Sensory Dendritic Arbors.

Dendritic morphology underlies the source and processing of neuronal signal inputs. Morphology can be broadly described by two types of geometric characteristics. The first is dendrogram topology, defined by the length and frequency of the arbor branches; the second is spatial embedding, mainly determined by branch angles and straightness. We have previously demonstrated that microtubules and actin filaments are associated with arbor elongation and branching, fully constraining dendrogram topology. Here, we relate the local distribution of these two primary cytoskeletal components with dendritic spatial embedding. We first reconstruct and analyze 167 sensory neurons from the Drosophila larva encompassing multiple cell classes and genotypes. We observe that branches with a higher microtubule concentration tend to deviate less from the direction of their parent branch across all neuron types. Higher microtubule branches are also overall straighter. F-actin displays a similar effect on angular deviation and branch straightness, but not as consistently across all neuron types as microtubule. These observations raise the question as to whether the associations between cytoskeletal distributions and arbor geometry are sufficient constraints to reproduce type-specific dendritic architecture. Therefore, we create a computational model of dendritic morphology purely constrained by the cytoskeletal composition measured from real neurons. The model quantitatively captures both spatial embedding and dendrogram topology across all tested neuron groups. These results suggest a common developmental mechanism regulating diverse morphologies, where the local cytoskeletal distribution can fully specify the overall emergent geometry of dendritic arbors.

Electron currents from gradual heating in tilted Dirac cone materials

Materials hosting tilted Dirac/Weyl fermions provide an emergent spacetime structure for the solid state physics. They admit a geometric description in terms of an effective spacetime metric. Using this metric that is rooted in the long-distance behavior of the underlying lattice, we formulate the hydrodynamic theory for tilted Dirac/Weyl materials in 2+12+1 spacetime dimensions. We find that the mingling of space and time through the off-diagonal components of the metric gives rise to: (i) heat and electric currents proportional to the temporal gradient of temperature, \partial_t T∂tT and (ii) a non-zero Hall-like conductance \sigma^{ij}\propto \zeta^i\zeta^jσij∝ζiζj where \zeta^jζj parameterize the tilt in jj’th space direction. The finding (i) above that can be demonstrated in the laboratory, implies that the non-trivial emergent spacetime geometry in these materials empowers them with a fascinating capability to harness naturally available sources of \partial_t T∂tT of hot deserts to produce electric current. We further find a tilt-induced non-Drude contribution to conductivity which can be experimentally disentangled from the usual Drude pole.

Deriving the dilaton potential in improved holographic QCD from the chiral condensate

Abstract We derive an explicit form of the dilaton potential in improved holographic QCD (IHQCD) from the QCD lattice data of the chiral condensate as a function of the quark mass. This establishes a data-driven holographic modeling of QCD—machine-learning holographic QCD. The modeling consists of two steps for solving inverse problems. The first inverse problem is to find the emergent bulk geometry consistent with the lattice QCD simulation data at the boundary. We solve this problem with the refinement of the neural ordinary differential equation, a machine-learning technique. The second inverse problem is to derive a bulk gravity action with a dilaton potential such that its solution is the emergent bulk geometry. We solve this problem at non-zero temperature, and derive the explicit form of the dilaton potential. The dilaton potential determines the bulk action, the Einstein-dilaton system; thus we derive holographically the bulk system from the QCD chiral condensate data. The usefulness of the model is shown in the example of the prediction of the string breaking distance, whose value is found to be consistent with other lattice QCD data.

Matrix entanglement

In gauge/gravity duality, matrix degrees of freedom on the gauge theory side play important roles for the emergent geometry. In this paper, we discuss how the entanglement on the gravity side can be described as the entanglement between matrix degrees of freedom. Our approach, which we call ‘matrix entanglement’, is different from ‘target-space entanglement’ proposed and discussed recently by several groups. We consider several classes of quantum states to which our approach can play important roles. When applied to fuzzy sphere, matrix entanglement can be used to define the usual spatial entanglement in two-brane or five-brane world-volume theory nonperturbatively in a regularized setup. Another application is to a small black hole in AdS5×S5 that can evaporate without being attached to a heat bath, for which our approach suggests a gauge theory origin of the Page curve. The confined degrees of freedom in the partially-deconfined states play the important roles.

-gravity in the context of dark energy with power law expansion and energy conditions* *G.M. and A.P. acknowledge the DSTB, Government of West Bengal, India for financial support through the Grants No.: 322(Sanc.)/ST/P/S&T/16G-3/2018 dated 06.03.2019. S.R. is thankful to the authority of IUCAA, Pune for providing Visiting Associateship under which a part of this work has been done

The objective of this work is to generate a general formalism of gravity in the context of dark energy under the framework of K-essence emergent geometry with the Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) variety of action, where is the familiar Ricci scalar, is the DBI type non-canonical Lagrangian with , and ϕ is the K-essence scalar field. The emergent gravity metric () and the well known gravitational metric () are not conformally equivalent. We have constructed a modified field equation using the metric formalism in -gravity incorporating the corresponding Friedmann equations into the framework of the background gravitational metric, which is of Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) type. The solution of the modified Friedmann equations have been deduced for the specific choice of , which is of Starobinsky-type, using the power law expansion method. The consistency of the model with the accelerating phase of the universe has been shown when we restrict ourselves to consider the value of the dark energy density as , which indicates that the present universe is dark-energy dominated. Graphical plots for the energy density (ρ), pressure (p), and equation of state parameter () with respect to (w.r.t.) time (t) based on parametric values are interestingly consistent with the dark energy domination theory, and hence the accelerating features. We also highlight the corresponding energy conditions and constraints of the theory with a basic example.

Observation of Topological p-Orbital Disclination States in Non-Euclidean Acoustic Metamaterials.

Disclinations-topological defects ubiquitously existing in various materials-can reveal the intrinsic band topology of the hosting material through the bulk-disclination correspondence. In low-dimensional materials and nanostructure such as graphene and fullerenes, disclinations yield curved surfaces and emergent non-Euclidean geometries that are crucial in understanding the properties of these materials. However, the bulk-disclination correspondence has never been studied in non-Euclidean geometry, nor in systems with p-orbital physics. Here, by creating p-orbital topological acoustic metamaterials with disclination-induced conic and hyperbolic surfaces, we demonstrate the rich emergent bound states arising from the interplay among the real-space geometry, the bulk band topology, and the p-orbital physics. This phenomenon is confirmed by clear experimental evidence that is consistent with theory and simulations. Our experiment paves the way toward topological phenomena in non-Euclidean geometries and will stimulate interesting research on, e.g., topological phenomena for electrons in nanomaterials with curved surfaces.

The Geomediatized Geographies of Marginalized Older Digital Citizens

In this article, I approach the Danish digitalization strategy as a Lefebvrian conceived space, focusing on how its ideology and spatial codes denote a normative vision for how citizens should and ought to be. Drawing on the non-media-centric concept of geomediatization and a feminist new materialist approach to gentrification as assemblage, the article explores the lived spaces of older (64+) marginalized citizens living in Sydhavnen, Copenhagen, an area currently undergoing gentrification. By focusing on the interplay between digitalization of the public sector and urban gentrification, the article sheds light on an emergent power geometry in which the potential for belonging is carved out differently for different citizens. In doing so, the article critically explores the more-than-representational geography of the digitalization strategy and contributes to the budding field of geomediatization studies.

BKP hierarchy, affine coordinates, and a formula for connected bosonic n-point functions

We derive a formula for the connected n-point functions of a tau-function of the BKP hierarchy in terms of its affine coordinates. This is a BKP-analogue of a formula for KP tau-functions proved by Zhou (Emergent geometry and mirror symmetry of a point, 2015. arXiv:1507.01679 ). Moreover, we prove a simple relation between the KP-affine coordinates of a tau-function $$\tau (\varvec{t})$$ of the KdV hierarchy and the BKP-affine coordinates of $$\tau (\varvec{t}/2)$$ . As applications, we present a new algorithm to compute the free energies of the Witten–Kontsevich tau-function and the Brézin–Gross–Witten tau-function.

Deriving the dilaton potential in improved holographic QCD from the meson spectrum

We derive an explicit form of the dilaton potential in improved holographic QCD (IHQCD) from the experimental data of the $\ensuremath{\rho}$ meson spectrum. For this purpose, we make use of the emergent bulk geometry obtained by deep learning from the hadronic data in the work by Akutagawa et al. [Phys. Rev. D 102, 026020 (2020)]. Requiring that the geometry is a solution of an IHQCD derives the corresponding dilaton potential backward. This determines the bulk action in a data-driven way, which enables us at the same time to ensure that the deep learning proposal is a consistent gravity. Furthermore, we find that the resulting potential satisfies the requirements normally imposed in IHQCD, and that the holographic Wilson loop for the derived model exhibits quark confinement.

Quantum minimal surfaces from quantum error correction

We show that complementary state-specific reconstruction of logical (bulk) operators is equivalent to the existence of a quantum minimal surface prescription for physical (boundary) entropies. This significantly generalizes both sides of an equivalence previously shown by Harlow[1]; in particular, we do not require the entanglement wedge to be the same for all states in the code space. In developing this theorem, we construct an emergent bulk geometry for general quantum codes, defining ``areas'' associated to arbitrary logical subsystems, and argue that this definition is ``functionally unique.'' We also formalize a definition of bulk reconstruction that we call ``state-specific product unitary’’ reconstruction. This definition captures the quantum error correction (QEC) properties present in holographic codes and has potential independent interest as a very broad generalization of QEC; it includes most traditional versions of QEC as special cases. Our results extend to approximate codes, and even to the ``non-isometric codes'' that seem to describe the interior of a black hole at late times.