On Distinguishability of Black Hole Microstates

Understand

We use the Holevo information to estimate distinguishability of microstates of a black hole in anti-de Sitter space by measurements one can perform on a subregion of a Cauchy surface of the dual conformal field theory.

• We find that microstates are not distinguishable at all until the subregion reaches a certain size and that perfect distinguishability can be achieved before the subregion covers the entire Cauchy surface.
• We will compare our results with expectations from the entanglement wedge reconstruction, tensor network models, and the bit threads interpretation of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula.