Theory HEP Seminar

Decorrelating regions of spacetime using split flow

Nima Lashkari

Purdue University

In holography, the one-sided time evolution of an eternal black hole stretches the wormhole decorrelating boundary subregions. Dynamical decorrelations of this type, in one-sided black holes or eternal ones, are responsible for the creation of islands, and the derivation of the page curve in gravity. Decorrelation in holography is special in that it is monotonic and this leads to an emergent second law of thermodynamics. Motivated by holography, I define unitary flows (split flows) with similar properties for arbitrary states of a quantum system, including states of QFT. I discuss how irreversibility can emerge in quantum mechanics. I comment on the connection of this work to the theory of quantum error correction.