Scott Aaronson - University of Texas at Austin
Wednesday, July 6, 10:45AM (Zoom meeting starts at 10:30)
“Discrete Bulk Reconstruction”
The AdS/CFT correspondence posits a duality between quantum theories of gravity in anti-de-Sitter (AdS) universes, and conformal field theories (CFTs) defined on the boundaries of those universes. In this talk, I'll explain how AdS/CFT works in a fully discrete setting accessible even to a theoretical computer scientist like me. The CFT side will encode the values of various min-cuts in a graph, and the "bulk-boundary dictionary" will involve the computational problem of finding a graph that has the prescribed cut values. Our main result is a natural set of assumptions (a 1D boundary with data for contiguous subregions) where this problem is not only always solvable, but is solvable via a planar graph that can be found in linear time.
I'll present lots of open problems.This is work-in-progress, joint with Jason Pollack.