Holographic Entanglement and Poincare blocks in three dimensional flat space

We propose a covariant prescription to compute holographic entanglement entropy and Poincare blocks (Global BMS blocks) in the context of three-dimensional Einstein gravity in flat space. We first present a prescription based on worldline methods in the probe limit, inspired by recent analog calculations in AdS/CFT. Building on this construction, we propose a full extrapolate dictionary and use it to compute holographic correlators and blocks away from the probe limit.Comment: 46 pages, 6 figure

Baby, dream your dream : Pearl Bailey, Hello, Dolly!, and the negotiation of race in commerical American musical theatre

In October of 1967, producer David Merrick closed his successful production of Hello, Dolly! Merrick reopened the show one month later with an all-black cast that featured the talents of performers Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway. While this Bailey Dolly! was a mammoth commercial success, this production brought attention to various problems concerning the interaction of black and white creative and performing talent in the venue of commercial American musical theatre. One such problem involved the risk of possible loss of genuine black culture and ignorance of recalcitrant intra-black-community difficulties and the extent to which African Americans should have desired entrée into bourgeois society, as the play Hello, Dolly! itself portrayed onstage. Another such problem involved the possibility of the production avoiding dealing with racism head-on in order to avoid alienating white audiences. A corollary of such problems begged the question of what vision of American integration and civil rights the show represented. On a more practical level, the Bailey Dolly! raised questions of the extent to which the Broadway stage needed reform with respect to its treatment of non-white participants. In this regard, questions arose as to whether there was any middle ground between calls for black separatist theatre and African-American participation in white commercial theatre, as well as to what extent white-dominated commercial American musical theatre would allow for black control of the creative and economic process. In exploring these broad areas of concern, the study finds a fundamental conundrum. The production, to a great extent, glossed over everyday problems that the African American faced in 1960s America. At the same time, the Bailey Dolly! celebrated the victories of the civil rights era, providing a blueprint for African-American bourgeois entrée. Thus, despite acknowledged detriments with respect to portraying a genuine African-American experience, the Bailey Dolly! served as a flashpoint of change in the treatment of African Americans in commercial American musical theatre, and as a harbinger for improvement in such treatment

The Right Development of Mount Desert

A privately printed piece discussing advantages and disadvantages of economic and residential development of the area of Mount Desert Island, Maine, and the relationships between summer and year round residents

Higher Curvature Gravity from Entanglement in Conformal Field Theories

By generalizing different recent works to the context of higher curvature gravity, we provide a unifying framework for three related results: (i) If an asymptotically AdS spacetime computes the entanglement entropies of ball-shaped regions in a CFT using a generalized Ryu-Takayanagi formula up to second order in state deformations around the vacuum, then the spacetime satisfies the correct gravitational equations of motion up to second order around AdS; (ii) The holographic dual of entanglement entropy in higher curvature theories of gravity is given by Wald entropy plus a particular correction term involving extrinsic curvatures; (iii) CFT relative entropy is dual to gravitational canonical energy (also in higher curvature theories of gravity). Especially for the second point, our novel derivation of this previously known statement does not involve the Euclidean replica trick.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Entanglement and complexity of interacting qubits subject to asymmetric noise

The simulation complexity of predicting the time evolution of delocalized many-body quantum systems has attracted much recent interest, and simulations of such systems in real quantum hardware are promising routes to demonstrating a quantum advantage over classical machines. In these proposals, random noise is an obstacle that must be overcome for a faithful simulation, and a single error event can be enough to drive the system to a classically trivial state. We argue that this need not always be the case, and consider a modification to a leading quantum sampling problem-- time evolution in an interacting Bose-Hubbard chain of transmon qubits [Neill et al, Science 2018] -- where each site in the chain has a driven coupling to a lossy resonator and particle number is no longer conserved. The resulting quantum dynamics are complex and highly nontrivial. We argue that this problem is harder to simulate than the isolated chain, and that it can achieve volume-law entanglement even in the strong noise limit, likely persisting up to system sizes beyond the scope of classical simulation. Further, we show that the metrics which suggest classical intractability for the isolated chain point to similar conclusions in the noisy case. These results suggest that quantum sampling problems including nontrivial noise could be good candidates for demonstrating a quantum advantage in near-term hardware.Comment: 20 pages, 15 figure

Enduring rivers of light: waters of memory, Aotearoa & Āniwaniwa

This essay considers the major New Zealand installation artwork Āniwaniwa, by Māori New Zealand artists Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura) and Rachel Rakena (Ngāi Tahu, Ngā Puhi) The paper contextualises the installation around text about dams that inundate homeplaces, and refers briefly to the indigenous politics of water and memory in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand. That Āniwaniwa received its most international exposure in a thirteenth-century salt warehouse at the 2007 Venice Biennale, where the viewer was invited to see the work whilst supine on the floors. It installation is testament to The artists innovation and calibre, as well as the evocative appeal of the work