English

Complexity for Conformal Field Theories in General Dimensions

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-02-04 v2 Quantum Physics

Abstract

We study circuit complexity for conformal field theory states in arbitrary dimensions. Our circuits start from a primary state and move along a unitary representation of the Lorentzian conformal group. Different choices of distance functions can be understood in terms of the geometry of coadjoint orbits of the conformal group. We explicitly relate our circuits to timelike geodesics in anti-de Sitter space and the complexity metric to distances between these geodesics. We extend our method to circuits in other symmetry groups using a group theoretic generalization of the notion of coherent states.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.06920,
  title  = {Complexity for Conformal Field Theories in General Dimensions},
  author = {Nicolas Chagnet and Shira Chapman and Jan de Boer and Claire Zukowski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.06920},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

5+18 pages, 2 figures; v2: substantial new results about geodesics in the complexity metric and the relation to holography

R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:01:36.772Z