Abstract:
We argue that novel (highly nonclassical) quantum extremal
surfaces play a crucial role in reconstructing the black hole interior
even for isolated, single-sided, non-evaporating black holes (i.e. with
no auxiliary reservoir). Specifically, any code subspace where interior
outgoing modes can be excited will have a quantum extremal surface in
its maximally mixed state. We argue that as a result, reconstruction of
interior outgoing modes is always exponentially complex. Our
construction provides evidence in favor of a strong Python's lunch
proposal: that nonminimal quantum extremal surfaces are the exclusive
source of exponential complexity in the holographic dictionary. We also
comment on the relevance of these quantum extremal surfaces to the
geometrization of state dependence in the typicality arguments for
firewalls.