Published September 15, 2024 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Entanglement asymmetry study of black hole radiation

  • 1. ROR icon International School for Advanced Studies
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 3. ROR icon University of Bologna

Abstract

Hawking's discovery that black holes can evaporate through radiation emission has posed a number of questions that with time became fundamental hallmarks for a quantum theory of gravity. The most famous one is likely the information paradox, which finds an elegant explanation in the Page argument suggesting that a black hole and its radiation can be effectively represented by a random state of qubits. Leveraging the same assumption, we ponder the extent to which a black hole may display emergent symmetries, employing the entanglement asymmetry as a modern, information-based indicator of symmetry breaking. We find that for a random state devoid of any symmetry, a U(1) symmetry emerges and it is exact in the thermodynamic limit before the Page time. At the Page time, the entanglement asymmetry shows a finite jump to a large value. Our findings imply that the emitted radiation is symmetric up to the Page time and then undergoes a sharp transition. Conversely the black hole is symmetric only after the Page time. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Copyright and License

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Acknowledgement

We thank Ahmed Almheiri, Souvik Banerjee, Stefano Liberati, Shota Komatsu, Kyriakos Papadodimas, and John Preskill for fruitful discussions. P. C. and F. A. acknowledge support from ERC under Consolidator Grant No. 771536 (New states of Entangled Matter Out of equilibrium). S. M. thanks the support from the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter and the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech.

Additional Information

After the submission of this manuscript, a complementary work appeared in the arXiv [52] showing the validity of our results even in the context of random unitary circuits.

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Additional details

Identifiers

ISSN
2470-0029

Related works

Has version
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2403.08459 (arXiv)

Funding

European Research Council
771536
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of Technology
Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics

Dates

Accepted
2024-08-05
Accepted
Available
2024-09-13
Published online

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics
Publication Status
Published