Complexity study of the Hartle-Hawking state in JT gravity
Abstract
The Wigner function, in general, takes on negative values, and the amount of negativity in the Wigner function gives an operationally meaningful measure of the complexity of simulating the quantum state on a classical computer. In this paper, we study the growth of Wigner negativity of the Hartle-Hawking state of Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity under time evolution. We work in the gravitational length basis, at genus zero, and at high temperature, β≪ 1. Our main analytic result is simple: to leading order in β the state is a Gaussian wavepacket of minimum uncertainty, sitting at rest at the turning point of the Liouville wall. Its Wigner function is therefore positive, and the negativity is 1+δ(β,t), where the correction δ is smaller than any power of β. We show that δ is an even function of time, so there is no linear growth at t=0, and that once the packet has reflected off the wall its leading-order evolution is a Clifford shear, which cannot change the negativity. We also numerically study the time evolution of the Wigner function and its negativity. We observe that δ stays below 10−11 at t=0 and through the reflection, then rises slowly over a few tens of β/π, and then approaches a late-time value consistent with δ∞(β) ≃ 0.08 e−4.4/β for 0.25 ≤ β≤ 1: the lower the temperature, the larger the late-time negativity. The exact survival amplitude Z(β+it)/Z(β) fixes the spread complexity to order t4, and it also fixes the seed-normalised Wigner diagnostic of our earlier work (arXiv:2607.04065, arXiv:2607.17346). We take this as evidence that the length basis is ideally suited for a dual, semi-classical description of the dynamics at genus zero. Beyond genus zero the length basis is overcomplete, and we make no statement about finite eS0.
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BibTeX
@misc{basu2026complexity,
title = {{Complexity study of the Hartle-Hawking state in JT gravity}},
author = {Ritam Basu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.00844},
eprint = {2610.00844},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00844},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Complexity study of the Hartle-Hawking state in JT gravity
AU - Ritam Basu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.00844
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00844
AB - The Wigner function, in general, takes on negative values, and the amount of negativity in the Wigner function gives an operationally meaningful measure of the complexity of simulating the quantum state on a classical computer. In this paper, we study the growth of Wigner negativity of the Hartle-Hawking state of Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity under time evolution. We work in the gravitational length basis, at genus zero, and at high temperature, β≪ 1. Our main analytic result is simple: to leading order in β the state is a Gaussian wavepacket of minimum uncertainty, sitting at rest at the turning point of the Liouville wall. Its Wigner function is therefore positive, and the negativity is 1+δ(β,t), where the correction δ is smaller than any power of β. We show that δ is an even function of time, so there is no linear growth at t=0, and that once the packet has reflected off the wall its leading-order evolution is a Clifford shear, which cannot change the negativity. We also numerically study the time evolution of the Wigner function and its negativity. We observe that δ stays below 10^−11 at t=0 and through the reflection, then rises slowly over a few tens of β/π, and then approaches a late-time value consistent with δ_∞(β) ≃ 0.08 e^−4.4/β for 0.25 ≤ β≤ 1: the lower the temperature, the larger the late-time negativity. The exact survival amplitude Z(β+it)/Z(β) fixes the spread complexity to order t^4, and it also fixes the seed-normalised Wigner diagnostic of our earlier work (arXiv:2607.04065, arXiv:2607.17346). We take this as evidence that the length basis is ideally suited for a dual, semi-classical description of the dynamics at genus zero. Beyond genus zero the length basis is overcomplete, and we make no statement about finite e^S_0.
ER -