Black Hole Interiors via Spin Models

Abstract: To model the interior of a black hole, a study is made of a spin system with long-range random four-spin couplings that exhibits quantum chaos. The black hole limit corresponds to a system where the microstates are approximately degenerate and equally likely, corresponding to the high temperature limit of the spin system. At the leading level of approximation, reconstruction of bulk physics implies that local probes of the black hole should exhibit free propagation and unitary local evolution. We test the conjecture that a particular mean field Hamiltonian provides such a local bulk Hamiltonian by numerically solving the exact Schrodinger equation and comparing the time evolution to the approximate mean field time values. We find excellent agreement between the two time evolutions for timescales smaller than the scrambling time. In earlier work, it was shown bulk evolution along comparable timeslices is spoiled by the presence of the curvature singularity, thus the matching found in the present work provides evidence of the success of this approach to interior holography. The numerical solutions also provide a useful testing ground for various measures of quantum chaos and global scrambling. A number of different observables, such as entanglement entropy, out-of-time-order correlators, and trace distance are used to study these effects. This leads to a suitable definition of scrambling time, and evidence is presented showing a logarithmic variation with the system size.