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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Signatures of rotating black holes in quantum superposition

A new approach for operationally studying the effects of spacetime in quantum superpositions of semiclassical states has recently been proposed by some of the authors. This approach was applied to the case of a (2+1)-dimensional Bañados-Teitelboim-Zanelli (BTZ) black hole in a superposition of masses, where it was shown that a two-level system interacting with a quantum field residing in the spacetime exhibits resonant peaks in its response at certain values of the superposed masses. Here, we extend this analysis to a mass-superposed rotating BTZ black hole, considering the case where the two-level system corotates with the black hole in a superposition of trajectories. We find similar resonances in the detector response function at rational ratios of the superposed outer horizon radii, specifically in the case where the ratio of the inner and outer horizons is fixed. This suggests a connection with Bekenstein’s seminal conjecture concerning the discrete horizon spectra of black holes in quantum gravity, generalized to the case of rotating black holes. Here, our results further indicate that deeper insights into quantum-gravitational phenomena may be accessible via tools in relativistic quantum information and curved spacetime quantum field theory.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2024

Complementarity for a dynamical black hole

Black hole complementarity posits that the interior of a black hole is not independent from its Hawking radiation. This leads to an apparent violation of causality: the interior can be acausally affected by operators acting solely on the radiation. We argue that this perspective is misleading and that the black hole interior must be viewed as existing in the causal past of the Hawking radiation, despite the fact that they are spacelike separated in the semiclassical description. Consequently, no operation on the Hawking radiation—no matter how complex—can affect the experience of an infalling observer. The black hole interior and the radiation only appear spacelike separated in the semiclassical description because an infalling observer’s ability to access complex information is limited; the chaotic dynamics on the horizon, as viewed from the exterior, then converts any effect caused by such an observer to information in the Hawking radiation which cannot be accessed at the semiclassical level. We arrive at the picture described above by considering a unitary exterior description in which the flow of information is strictly causal, which we extend to apply throughout the entire history of black hole evolution, including its formation. This description uses the stretched event horizon as an inner edge of spacetime, on which the information inside is holographically encoded. We argue that the global spacetime picture arises from coarse graining over black hole microstates, and discuss its relationship with the exterior description.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Holographic Space-Time and Quantum Information

The formalism of Holographic Space-time (HST) is a translation of the principles of Lorentzian geometry into the language of quantum information. Intervals along time-like trajectories, and their associated causal diamonds, completely characterize a Lorentzian geometry. The Bekenstein-Hawking-Gibbons-’t Hooft-Jacobson-Fischler-Susskind-Bousso Covariant Entropy Principle, equates the logarithm of the dimension of the Hilbert space associated with a diamond to one quarter of the area of the diamond’s holographic screen, measured in Planck units. The most convincing argument for this principle is Jacobson’s derivation of Einstein’s equations as the hydrodynamic expression of this entropy law. In that context, the null energy condition (NEC) is seen to be the analog of the local law of entropy increase. The quantum version of Einstein’s relativity principle is a set of constraints on the mutual quantum information shared by causal diamonds along different time-like trajectories. The implementation of this constraint for trajectories in relative motion is the greatest unsolved problem in HST. The other key feature of HST is its claim that, for non-negative cosmological constant or causal diamonds much smaller than the asymptotic radius of curvature for negative c.c., the degrees of freedom localized in the bulk of a diamond are constrained states of variables defined on the holographic screen. This principle gives a simple explanation of otherwise puzzling features of BH entropy formulae, and resolves the firewall problem for black holes in Minkowski space. It motivates a covariant version of the CKN [1] bound on the regime of validity of quantum field theory (QFT) and a detailed picture of the way in which QFT emerges as an approximation to the exact theory

tensor network↗
DOE OSTI2020

THEMIS: A Parameter Estimation Framework for the Event Horizon Telescope

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) provides the unprecedented ability to directly resolve the structure and dynamics of black hole emission regions on scales smaller than their horizons. This has the potential to critically probe the mechanisms by which black holes accrete and launch outflows, and the structure of supermassive black hole spacetimes. However, accessing this information is a formidable analysis challenge for two reasons. First, the EHT natively produces a variety of data types that encode information about the image structure in nontrivial ways; these are subject to a variety of systematic effects associated with very long baseline interferometry and are supplemented by a wide variety of auxiliary data on the primary EHT targets from decades of other observations. Second, models of the emission regions and their interaction with the black hole are complex, highly uncertain, and computationally expensive to construct. As a result, the scientific utilization of EHT observations requires a flexible, extensible, and powerful analysis framework. We present such a framework, Themis, which defines a set of interfaces between models, data, and sampling algorithms that facilitates future development. We describe the design and currently existing components of Themis, how Themis has been validated thus far, and present additional analyses made possible by Themis that illustrate its capabilities. Importantly, we demonstrate that Themis is able to reproduce prior EHT analyses, extend these, and do so in a computationally efficient manner that can efficiently exploit modern high-performance computing facilities. Themis has already been used extensively in the scientific analysis and interpretation of the first EHT observations of M87.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Unsupervised discovery of extreme weather events using universal representations of emergent organization

Spontaneous self-organization is ubiquitous in systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. While organized structures that emerge dominate transport properties, universal representations that identify and describe these key objects remain elusive. Here, we introduce a theoretically grounded framework for describing emergent organization that, via data-driven algorithms, is constructive in practice. Its building blocks are spacetime lightcones that embody how information propagates across a system through local interactions. We show that predictive equivalence classes of lightcones—local causal states—capture organized behaviors in complex spatiotemporal systems. Employing an unsupervised physics-informed machine learning algorithm and a high-performance computing implementation, we demonstrate automatically discovering organized structures in two real-world domain science problems. We show that local causal states identify vortices and track their power-law decay behavior in two-dimensional fluid turbulence. We then show how to detect and track familiar extreme weather events—hurricanes and atmospheric rivers—and discover other novel structures associated with precipitation extremes in high-resolution climate data at the grid-cell level.

Rupe, Adam [Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ↗
DOE OSTI2023

Theory and Simulations of Emergent Geometry in Quantum Gravity (Final Technical Report)

This is the final technical report for the QuantISED Award to PIs Hartman, Ginsparg, and McMahon at Cornell University, outlining the goals of the research project and summarizing its main technical achievements. These include the discovery of new non-perturbative effects in quantum gravity known as replica wormholes which play an important role in the black hole information paradox, new methods to study cosmological spacetimes using the tools of holographic duality, and new experimental results on error mitigation in quantum computing.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2020

Replica wormhole and information retrieval in the SYK model coupled to Majorana chains

Motivated by recent studies of the information paradox in (1+1)-D anti-de Sitter spacetime with a bath described by a (1+1)-D conformal field theory, we study the dynamics of second Ŕenyi entropy of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model (χ) coupled to a Majorana chain bath (ψ). The system is prepared in the thermofield double (TFD) state and then evolved by HL + HR. For small system-bath coupling, we find that the second Rényi entropy $S^(2)_{χL,χR}$ of the SYK model undergoes a first order transition during the evolution. In the sense of holographic duality, the long-time solution corresponds to a “replica wormhole”. The transition time corresponds to the Page time of a black hole coupled to a thermal bath. We further study the information scrambling and retrieval by introducing a classical control bit, which controls whether or not we add a perturbation in the SYK system. The mutual information between the bath and the control bit shows a positive jump at the Page time, indicating that the entanglement wedge of the bath includes an island in the holographic bulk.

1/N Expansion↗
DOE OSTI2024

Geometric quantum states beyond the AdS/CFT correspondence

We characterize the quantum states dual to entanglement wedges in arbitrary spacetimes, in settings where the matter entropy can be neglected compared to the geometric entropy. In AdS/CFT, such states obey special entropy inequalities known as the holographic entropy cone. In particular, the mutual information of CFT subregions is monogamous (MMI). We extend this result to arbitrary spacetimes, using a recent proposal for the generalized entanglement wedge e ( a ) of a gravitating region a . Given independent input regions a , b , and c , we prove MMI: Area [ e ( a ) ] + Area [ e ( b ) ] + Area [ e ( c ) ] − Area [ e ( a b ) ] − Area [ e ( b c ) ] − Area [ e ( c a ) ] + Area [ e ( a b c ) ] ≤ 0 . We expect that the full holographic entropy cone can be extended to arbitrary spacetimes using similar methods. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗
DOE OSTI2020

Replica wormholes and the entropy of Hawking radiation

The information paradox can be realized in anti-de Sitter spacetime joined to a Minkowski region. In this setting, we show that the large discrepancy between the von Neumann entropy as calculated by Hawking and the requirements of unitarity is fixed by including new saddles in the gravitational path integral. These saddles arise in the replica method as complexified wormholes connecting different copies of the black hole. As the replica number n → 1, the presence of these wormholes leads to the island rule for the computation of the fine-grained gravitational entropy. We discuss these replica wormholes explicitly in two-dimensional Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity coupled to matter.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2021

Wrapped fivebranes redux

The near-horizon region of Neveu-Schwarz fivebranes provides interesting examples of gauge/gravity duality. We revisit the structure of wrapped and/or intersecting fivebranes using the tools of null-gauged WZW models in worldsheet string theory, revealing the effective geometry of the fivebrane throat in a variety of examples. Variant gaugings yield linear dilaton fivebrane throats with AdS 3 caps, providing a wealth of information about the near-BPS structure of the corresponding spacetime CFT duals.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Algebraic ER=EPR and complexity transfer

We propose an algebraic definition of ER=EPR in the G N → 0 limit, which associates bulk spacetime connectivity/disconnectivity to the operator algebraic structure of a quantum gravity system. The new formulation not only includes information on the amount of entanglement, but also more importantly the structure of entanglement. We give an independent definition of a quantum wormhole as part of the proposal. This algebraic version of ER=EPR sheds light on a recent puzzle regarding spacetime disconnectivity in holographic systems with $\mathcal{O}$(1/G N ) entanglement. We discuss the emergence of quantum connectivity in the context of black hole evaporation and further argue that at the Page time, the black hole-radiation system undergoes a transition involving the transfer of an emergent type III 1 subalgebra of high complexity operators from the black hole to radiation. We argue this is a general phenomenon that occurs whenever there is an exchange of dominance between two competing quantum extremal surfaces.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2022

The connected wedge theorem and its consequences

In the AdS/CFT correspondence, bulk causal structure has consequences for boundary entanglement. In quantum information science, causal structures can be replaced by distributed entanglement for the purposes of information processing. In this work, we deepen the understanding of both of these statements, and their relationship, with a number of new results. Centrally, we present and prove a new theorem, the n-to-n connected wedge theorem, which considers n input and n output locations at the boundary of an asymptotically AdS 2+1 spacetime described by AdS/CFT. When a sufficiently strong set of causal connections exists among these points in the bulk, a set of n associated regions in the boundary will have extensive-in-N mutual information across any bipartition of the regions. The proof holds in three bulk dimensions for classical spacetimes satisfying the null curvature condition and for semiclassical spacetimes satisfying standard conjectures. The n-to-n connected wedge theorem gives a precise example of how causal connections in a bulk state can emerge from large-N entanglement features of its boundary dual. It also has consequences for quantum information theory: it reveals one pattern of entanglement which is sufficient for information processing in a particular class of causal networks. We argue this pattern is also necessary, and give an AdS/CFT inspired protocol for information processing in this setting. Our theorem generalizes the 2-to-2 connected wedge theorem proven in [3]. We also correct some errors in the proof presented there, in particular a false claim that existing proof techniques work above three bulk dimensions.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Large-d phase transitions in holographic mutual information

In the AdS/CFT correspondence, the entanglement entropy of subregions in the boundary CFT is conjectured to be dual to the area of a bulk extremal surface at leading order in G N in the holographic limit. Under this dictionary, distantly separated regions in the CFT vacuum state have zero mutual information at leading order, and only attain nonzero mutual information at this order when they lie close enough to develop significant classical and quantum correlations. Previously, the separation at which this phase transition occurs for equal-size ball-shaped regions centered at antipodal points on the boundary was known analytically only in 3 spacetime dimensions. Inspired by recent explorations of general relativity at large- d , we compute the separation at which the phase transition occurs analytically in the limit of infinitely many spacetime dimensions, and find that distant regions cannot develop large correlations without collectively occupying the entire volume of the boundary theory. We interpret this result as illustrating the spatial decoupling of holographic correlations in the large- d limit, and provide intuition for this phenomenon using results from quantum information theory. We also compute the phase transition separation numerically for a range of bulk spacetime dimensions from 4 to 21, where analytic results are intractable but numerical results provide insight into the dimension-dependence of holographic correlations. For bulk dimensions above 5, our exact numerical results are well approximated analytically by working to next-to-leading order in the large- d expansion.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Numerical relativity in spherical coordinates: A new dynamical spacetime and general relativistic MHD evolution framework for the Einstein Toolkit

We present SphericalNR, a new framework for the publicly available Einstein Toolkit that numerically solves the Einstein field equations coupled to the equations of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) in a 3+1 split of spacetime in spherical coordinates without symmetry assumptions. The spacetime evolution is performed using reference-metric versions of either the Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura equations or the fully covariant and conformal Z4 system with constraint damping. We have developed a reference-metric version of the Valencia formulation of GRMHD with a vector potential method, guaranteeing the absence of magnetic monopoles during the evolution. In our framework, every dynamical field (both spacetime and matter) is evolved using its components in an orthonormal basis with respect to the spherical reference metric. Furthermore, all geometric information about the spherical coordinate system is encoded in source terms appearing in the evolution equations. This allows for the straightforward extension of Cartesian high-resolution shock-capturing finite volume codes to use spherical coordinates with our framework. To this end, we have adapted GRHydro, a Cartesian finite volume GRMHD code already available in the Einstein Toolkit, to use spherical coordinates. We present the full evolution equations of the framework, as well as details of its implementation in the Einstein Toolkit. Finally, we validate SphericalNR by demonstrating it passes a variety of challenging code tests in static and dynamical spacetimes.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Universality in Quantum Gravity. Final Technical Report

This is the final technical report for the DOE Early Career Award to PI Thomas Hartman at Cornell University, outlining the goals of the research project and summarizing its main technical achievements. These include the discovery of new constraints on quantum field theory, new theoretical methods that allow for a direct derivation of emergent spacetime from conformal field theory in certain settings, and the discovery of fundamental bounds on the dynamics of quantum information.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Islands in cosmology

A quantum extremal island suggests that a region of spacetime is encoded in the quantum state of another system, like the encoding of the black hole interior in Hawking radiation. We study conditions for islands to appear in general spacetimes, with or without black holes. They must violate Bekenstein’s area bound in a precise sense, and the boundary of an island must satisfy several other information-theoretic inequalities. These conditions combine to impose very strong restrictions, which we apply to cosmological models. We find several examples of islands in crunching universes. In particular, in the four-dimensional FRW cosmology with radiation and a negative cosmological constant, there is an island near the turning point when the geometry begins to recollapse. In a two-dimensional model of JT gravity in de Sitter spacetime, there are islands inside crunches that are encoded at future infinity or inside bubbles of Minkowski spacetime. Finally, we discuss simple tensor network toy models for islands in cosmology and black holes.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Relativistic gas accretion onto supermassive black hole binaries from inspiral through merger

Accreting supermassive black hole binaries are powerful multimessenger sources emitting both gravitational and electromagnetic (EM) radiation. Understanding the accretion dynamics of these systems and predicting their distinctive EM signals is crucial to informing and guiding upcoming efforts aimed at detecting gravitational waves produced by these binaries. To this end, accurate numerical modeling is required to describe both the spacetime and the magnetized gas around the black holes. In this paper, we present two key advances in this field of research. First, we have developed a novel 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) framework that combines multiple numerical codes to simulate the inspiral and merger of supermassive black hole binaries starting from realistic initial data and running all the way through merger. Throughout the evolution, we adopt a simple but functional prescription to account for gas cooling through photon emission. Next, we have applied our new computational method to follow the time evolution of a circular, equal-mass, nonspinning black hole binary for ∼200 orbits, starting from a separation of 20⁢𝑟 𝑔 and reaching the postmerger evolutionary stage of the system. We have shown how mass continues to flow toward the binary even after the binary “decouples” from its surrounding disk, but the accretion rate onto the black holes diminishes. We have identified how the minidisks orbiting each black hole are slowly drained and eventually dissolve as the binary compresses. We confirm previous findings that the system’s luminosity decreases by a factor of a few during inspiral; however, we observe an abrupt increase by ∼50% in this quantity at the time of merger, likely accompanied by an equally abrupt change in spectrum. Lastly, we have demonstrated that during the inspiral, fluid ram pressure regulates the fraction of the magnetic flux transported to the binary that attaches to the black holes’ horizons.

Accretion disk & black-hole plasma↗
DOE OSTI2021

Mutual information superadditivity and unitarity bounds

We derive the property of strong superadditivity of mutual information arising from the Markov property of the vacuum state in a conformal field theory and strong subadditivity of entanglement entropy. We show this inequality encodes unitarity bounds for different types of fields. These unitarity bounds are precisely the ones that saturate for free fields. This has a natural explanation in terms of the possibility of localizing algebras on null surfaces. A particular continuity property of mutual information characterizes free fields from the entropic point of view. We derive a general formula for the leading long distance term of the mutual information for regions of arbitrary shape which involves the modular flow of these regions. We obtain the general form of this leading term for two spheres with arbitrary orientations in spacetime, and for primary fields of any tensor representation. For free fields we further obtain the explicit form of the leading term for arbitrary regions with boundaries on null cones.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗