PIRSA:19100040 Scientific Series Quantum Fields and Strings

DOI10.48660/19100040

Series: Quantum Fields and Strings

Shahbazi-Moghaddam, A. (2019). Ignorance is Cheap: From Black Hole Entropy To Energy-Minimizing States In QFT. Perimeter Institute. https://pirsa.org/19100040

Shahbazi-Moghaddam, Arvin. Ignorance is Cheap: From Black Hole Entropy To Energy-Minimizing States In QFT. Perimeter Institute, Oct. 29, 2019, https://pirsa.org/19100040 

@misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:19100040,
  doi = {10.48660/19100040},
  url = {https://pirsa.org/19100040},
  author = {Shahbazi-Moghaddam, Arvin},
  keywords = {Quantum Fields and Strings},
  language = {en},
  title = {Ignorance is Cheap: From Black Hole Entropy To Energy-Minimizing States In QFT},
  publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
  year = {2019},
  month = {oct},
  note = {PIRSA:19100040 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
}

Abstract

Behind certain marginally trapped surfaces one can construct a geometry containing an extremal surface of equal, but not larger area. This construction underlies the Engelhardt-Wall proposal for explaining the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy as a coarse-grained entropy. The construction can be proven to exist classically but fails if the Null Energy Condition is violated. Here we extend the coarse-graining construction to semiclassical gravity. Its validity is conjectural, but we are able to extract an interesting nongravitational limit. Our proposal implies Wall’s ant conjecture on the minimum energy of a completion of a quantum field theory state on a halfspace. It further constrains the properties of the minimum energy state; for example, the minimum completion energy must be localized as a shock at the cut. We verify that the predicted properties hold in a recent explicit construction of Ceyhan and Faulkner, which proves our conjecture in the nongravitational limit.

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