English

Random Circuits in the Black Hole Interior

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-07-24 v4 Quantum Physics

Abstract

In this paper, we present a quantitative holographic relation between a microscopic measure of randomness and the geometric length of the wormhole in the black hole interior. To this end, we perturb an AdS black hole with Brownian semiclassical sources, implementing the continuous version of a random quantum circuit for the black hole. We use the random circuit to prepare ensembles of states of the black hole whose semiclassical duals contain Einstein-Rosen (ER) caterpillars: long cylindrical wormholes with large numbers of matter inhomogeneities, of linearly growing length with the circuit time. In this setup, we show semiclassically that the ensemble of ER caterpillars of average length kΔk\ell_{\Delta} and matter correlation scale Δ\ell_{\Delta} forms an approximate quantum state kk-design of the black hole. At exponentially long circuit times, the ensemble of ER caterpillars becomes polynomial-copy indistinguishable from a collection of random states of the black hole. We comment on the implications of these results for holographic circuit complexity and for the holographic description of the black hole interior.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.08693,
  title  = {Random Circuits in the Black Hole Interior},
  author = {Javier M. Magan and Martin Sasieta and Brian Swingle},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.08693},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

56 pages + appendices. v4: added video abstract. Watch a 4-minute video abstract here: https://youtu.be/M9c1M9wNIc4

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:31:31.622Z