Holographic principle

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The holographic principle is a property of string theories and a supposed property of quantum
gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on
aboundary to the regionpreferably a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed
by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string-theory interpretation by Leonard Susskind[1] who
combined his ideas with previous ones of 't Hooft and Charles Thorn.[1][2] As pointed out by Raphael
Bousso,[3] Thorn observed in 1978 that string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which
gravity emerges from it in what would now be called a holographic way.
In a larger sense, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as twodimensional information on the cosmological horizon, the event horizon from which information may
still be gathered and not lost due to the natural limitations of spacetime supporting a black hole, an

observer and a given setting of these specific elements,[clarification needed] such that the three dimensions we
observe are an effective description only at macroscopic scales and at low energies. Cosmological
holography has not been made mathematically precise, partly because the particle horizon has a
non-zero area and grows with time.[4][5]
The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which conjectures that the
maximal entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected.
In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the informational content of all the objects that have
fallen into the hole might be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The
holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string
theory.[6] However, there exist classical solutions to the Einstein equations that allow values of the
entropy larger than those allowed by an area law, hence in principle larger than those of a black
hole. These are the so-called "Wheeler's bags of gold". The existence of such solutions conflicts with
the holographic interpretation, and their effects in a quantum theory of gravity including the
holographic principle are not yet fully understood.[7]
Contents
[hide]

1Black hole entropy

2Black hole information paradox

3Limit on information density

4High-level summary
o

4.1Unexpected connection

4.2Energy, matter, and information equivalence

5Experimental tests

6Tests of Maldacena's conjecture

7See also

8Notes

9References

10External links

Black hole entropy[edit]

Main article: Black hole thermodynamics
An object with relatively high entropy is microscopically random, like a hot gas. A known
configuration of classical fields has zero entropy: there is nothing random
about electric and magnetic fields, orgravitational waves. Since black holes are exact solutions
of Einstein's equations, they were thought not to have any entropy either.

But Jacob Bekenstein noted that this leads to a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. If
one throws a hot gas with entropy into a black hole, once it crosses the event horizon, the entropy
would disappear. The random properties of the gas would no longer be seen once the black hole
had absorbed the gas and settled down. One way of salvaging the second law is if black holes are in
fact random objects, with an enormous entropy whose increase is greater than the entropy carried
by the gas.
Bekenstein assumed that black holes are maximum entropy objectsthat they have more entropy
than anything else in the same volume. In a sphere of radius R, the entropy in a relativistic gas
increases as the energy increases. The only known limit is gravitational; when there is too much
energy the gas collapses into a black hole. Bekenstein used this to put an upper bound on the
entropy in a region of space, and the bound was proportional to the area of the region. He concluded
that the black hole entropy is directly proportional to the area of the event horizon.[8]
Stephen Hawking had shown earlier that the total horizon area of a collection of black holes always
increases with time. The horizon is a boundary defined by light-like geodesics; it is those light rays
that are just barely unable to escape. If neighboring geodesics start moving toward each other they
eventually collide, at which point their extension is inside the black hole. So the geodesics are
always moving apart, and the number of geodesics which generate the boundary, the area of the
horizon, always increases. Hawking's result was called the second law of black hole
thermodynamics, by analogy with the law of entropy increase, but at first, he did not take the analogy
too seriously.
Hawking knew that if the horizon area were an actual entropy, black holes would have to radiate.
When heat is added to a thermal system, the change in entropy is the increase in massenergy divided by temperature:

If black holes have a finite entropy, they should also have a finite temperature. In particular, they
would come to equilibrium with a thermal gas of photons. This means that black holes would not
only absorb photons, but they would also have to emit them in the right amount to
maintain detailed balance.
Time independent solutions to field equations do not emit radiation, because a time independent
background conserves energy. Based on this principle, Hawking set out to show that black holes
do not radiate. But, to his surprise, a careful analysis convinced him that they do, and in just the
right way to come to equilibrium with a gas at a finite temperature. Hawking's calculation fixed
the constant of proportionality at 1/4; the entropy of a black hole is one quarter its horizon area
inPlanck units.[9]
The entropy is proportional to the logarithm of the number of microstates, the ways a system can
be configured microscopically while leaving the macroscopic description unchanged. Black hole
entropy is deeply puzzling it says that the logarithm of the number of states of a black hole is
proportional to the area of the horizon, not the volume in the interior.[10]
Later, Raphael Bousso came up with a covariant version of the bound based upon null sheets.

Black hole information paradox[edit]

Main article: Black hole information paradox
Hawking's calculation suggested that the radiation which black holes emit is not related in any
way to the matter that they absorb. The outgoing light rays start exactly at the edge of the black
hole and spend a long time near the horizon, while the infalling matter only reaches the horizon
much later. The infalling and outgoing mass/energy only interact when they cross. It is

implausible that the outgoing state would be completely determined by some tiny residual
scattering.[citation needed]
Hawking interpreted this to mean that when black holes absorb some photons in a pure state
described by a wave function, they re-emit new photons in a thermal mixed state described by
a density matrix. This would mean that quantum mechanics would have to be modified, because
in quantum mechanics, states which are superpositions with probability amplitudes never
become states which are probabilistic mixtures of different possibilities.[note 1]
Troubled by this paradox, Gerard 't Hooft analyzed the emission of Hawking radiation in more
detail. He noted that when Hawking radiation escapes, there is a way in which incoming
particles can modify the outgoing particles. Their gravitational field would deform the horizon of
the black hole, and the deformed horizon could produce different outgoing particles than the
undeformed horizon. When a particle falls into a black hole, it is boosted relative to an outside
observer, and its gravitational field assumes a universal form. 't Hooft showed that this field
makes a logarithmic tent-pole shaped bump on the horizon of a black hole, and like a shadow,
the bump is an alternate description of the particle's location and mass. For a four-dimensional
spherical uncharged black hole, the deformation of the horizon is similar to the type of
deformation which describes the emission and absorption of particles on a string-theory world
sheet. Since the deformations on the surface are the only imprint of the incoming particle, and
since these deformations would have to completely determine the outgoing particles, 't Hooft
believed that the correct description of the black hole would be by some form of string theory.
This idea was made more precise by Leonard Susskind, who had also been developing
holography, largely independently. Susskind argued that the oscillation of the horizon of a black
hole is a complete description[note 2] of both the infalling and outgoing matter, because the worldsheet theory of string theory was just such a holographic description. While short strings have
zero entropy, he could identify long highly excited string states with ordinary black holes. This
was a deep advance because it revealed that strings have a classical interpretation in terms of
black holes.
This work showed that the black hole information paradox is resolved when quantum gravity is
described in an unusual string-theoretic way assuming the string-theoretical description is
complete, unambiguous and non-redundant.[12] The space-time in quantum gravity would emerge
as an effective description of the theory of oscillations of a lower-dimensional black-hole horizon,
and suggest that any black hole with appropriate properties, not just strings, would serve as a
basis for a description of string theory.
In 1995, Susskind, along with collaborators Tom Banks, Willy Fischler, and Stephen Shenker,
presented a formulation of the new M-theory using a holographic description in terms of charged
point black holes, the D0 branes of type IIA string theory. The Matrix theory they proposed was
first suggested as a description of two branes in 11-dimensional supergravity by Bernard de
Wit, Jens Hoppe, and Hermann Nicolai. The later authors reinterpreted the same matrix models
as a description of the dynamics of point black holes in particular limits. Holography allowed
them to conclude that the dynamics of these black holes give a complete nonperturbative formulation of M-theory. In 1997, Juan Maldacena gave the first holographic
descriptions of a higher-dimensional object, the 3+1-dimensional type IIB membrane, which
resolved a long-standing problem of finding a string description which describes a gauge theory.
These developments simultaneously explained how string theory is related to some forms of
supersymmetric quantum field theories.

Limit on information density[edit]

Entropy, if considered as information (see information entropy), is measured in bits. The total
quantity of bits is related to the total degrees of freedom of matter/energy.

For a given energy in a given volume, there is an upper limit to the density of information
(the Bekenstein bound) about the whereabouts of all the particles which compose matter in that
volume, suggesting that matter itself cannot be subdivided infinitely many times and there must
be an ultimate level of fundamental particles. As the degrees of freedom of a particle are the
product of all the degrees of freedom of its sub-particles, were a particle to have infinite
subdivisions into lower-level particles, the degrees of freedom of the original particle would be
infinite, violating the maximal limit of entropy density. The holographic principle thus implies that
the subdivisions must stop at some level, and that the fundamental particle is a bit (1 or 0) of
information.
The most rigorous realization of the holographic principle is the AdS/CFT correspondence
by Juan Maldacena. However, J.D. Brown and Marc Henneaux had rigorously proved already in
1986, that the asymptotic symmetry of 2+1 dimensional gravity gives rise to a Virasoro algebra,
whose corresponding quantum theory is a 2-dimensional conformal field theory.[13]

High-level summary[edit]
The physical universe is widely seen to be composed of "matter" and "energy". In his 2003
article published in Scientific American magazine, Jacob Bekenstein summarized a current trend
started by John Archibald Wheeler, which suggests scientists may "regard the physical world as
made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals." Bekenstein asks "Could we,
as William Blake memorably penned, 'see a world in a grain of sand,' or is that idea no more
than 'poetic license,'"[14] referring to the holographic principle.

Unexpected connection[edit]
Bekenstein's topical overview "A Tale of Two Entropies"[15] describes potentially profound
implications of Wheeler's trend, in part by noting a previously unexpected connection between
the world of information theory and classical physics. This connection was first described shortly
after the seminal 1948 papers of American applied mathematician Claude E.
Shannon introduced today's most widely used measure of information content, now known
as Shannon entropy. As an objective measure of the quantity of information, Shannon entropy
has been enormously useful, as the design of all modern communications and data storage
devices, from cellular phones to modems to hard disk drives and DVDs, rely on Shannon
entropy.
In thermodynamics (the branch of physics dealing with heat), entropy is popularly described as a
measure of the "disorder" in a physical system of matter and energy. In 1877 Austrian
physicist Ludwig Boltzmann described it more precisely in terms of the number of distinct
microscopic states that the particles composing a macroscopic "chunk" of matter could be in
while still looking like the same macroscopic "chunk". As an example, for the air in a room, its
thermodynamic entropy would equal the logarithm of the count of all the ways that the individual
gas molecules could be distributed in the room, and all the ways they could be moving.

Energy, matter, and information equivalence[edit]

Shannon's efforts to find a way to quantify the information contained in, for example, an e-mail
message, led him unexpectedly to a formula with the same form as Boltzmann's. In an article in
the August 2003 issue of Scientific American titled "Information in the Holographic Universe",
Bekenstein summarizes that "Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually
equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the
amount of Shannon information one would need to implement any particular arrangement..." of
matter and energy. The only salient difference between the thermodynamic entropy of physics
and Shannon's entropy of information is in the units of measure; the former is expressed in units
of energy divided by temperature, the latter in essentially dimensionless "bits" of information.

The holographic principle states that the entropy of ordinary mass (not just black holes) is also
proportional to surface area and not volume; that volume itself is illusory and the universe is
really a hologram which is isomorphic to the information "inscribed" on the surface of its
boundary.[10]

Experimental tests[edit]
The Fermilab physicist Craig Hogan claims that the holographic principle would imply quantum
fluctuations in spatial position[16] that would lead to apparent background noise or "holographic
noise" measurable at gravitational wave detectors, in particular GEO 600.[17] However these
claims have not been widely accepted, or cited, among quantum gravity researchers and appear
to be in direct conflict with string theory calculations.[18]
Analyses in 2011 of measurements of gamma ray burst GRB 041219A in 2004 by
the INTEGRAL space observatory launched in 2002 by the European Space Agency shows that
Craig Hogan's noise is absent down to a scale of 1048 meters, as opposed to scale of
1035 meters predicted by Hogan, and the scale of 1016 meters found in measurements of
the GEO 600 instrument.[19] Research continues at Fermilab under Hogan as of 2013.[20]
Jacob Bekenstein also claims to have found a way to test the holographic principle with a
tabletop photon experiment.[21]

Tests of Maldacena's conjecture[edit]

Main article: Maldacena conjecture
Hyakutake et al. in 2013/4 published two papers[22] that bring computational evidence that
Maldacenas conjecture is true. One paper computes the internal energy of a black hole, the
position of its event horizon, its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string
theory and the effects of virtual particles. The other paper calculates the internal energy of the
corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two simulations match. The
papers are not an actual proof of Maldacena's conjecture for all cases but a demonstration that
the conjecture works for a particular theoretical case and a verification of the AdS/CFT
correspondence for a particular situation.[23]