English

Complexity and Shock Wave Geometries

High Energy Physics - Theory 2014-12-17 v2

Abstract

In this paper we refine a conjecture relating the time-dependent size of an Einstein-Rosen bridge to the computational complexity of the of the dual quantum state. Our refinement states that the complexity is proportional to the spatial volume of the ERB. More precisely, up to an ambiguous numerical coefficient, we propose that the complexity is the regularized volume of the largest codimension one surface crossing the bridge, divided by GNlAdSG_N l_{AdS}. We test this conjecture against a wide variety of spherically symmetric shock wave geometries in different dimensions. We find detailed agreement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1406.2678,
  title  = {Complexity and Shock Wave Geometries},
  author = {Douglas Stanford and Leonard Susskind},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.2678},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

25 pages, 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:35:25.688Z