English

The Second Law of Quantum Complexity

High Energy Physics - Theory 2018-12-07 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Quantum Physics

Abstract

We give arguments for the existence of a thermodynamics of quantum complexity that includes a "Second Law of Complexity". To guide us, we derive a correspondence between the computational (circuit) complexity of a quantum system of KK qubits, and the positional entropy of a related classical system with 2K2^K degrees of freedom. We also argue that the kinetic entropy of the classical system is equivalent to the Kolmogorov complexity of the quantum Hamiltonian. We observe that the expected pattern of growth of the complexity of the quantum system parallels the growth of entropy of the classical system. We argue that the property of having less-than-maximal complexity (uncomplexity) is a resource that can be expended to perform directed quantum computation. Although this paper is not primarily about black holes, we find a surprising interpretation of the uncomplexity-resource as the accessible volume of spacetime behind a black hole horizon.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.01107,
  title  = {The Second Law of Quantum Complexity},
  author = {Adam R. Brown and Leonard Susskind},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.01107},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

v2: minor improvements

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:41:16.966Z