Deans’ Summer Research Fellowship (DSRF) Story: Anna Brown

Author: Anna Brown

What was your major research question for the DSRF project and where do you hope this project will go?

My major research question for the DSRF project was: how does mutual information between a black hole's radiation subspace and a reference qubits saturate as the black hole evolves? I investigated how the saturation depends on the choice of internal dynamics and initial state. I learned that the choice of each impacts how mutual information change over time, which is helpful to quantify when information leaks out of a black hole. From here, I hope to explore how to actually decode the desired information from the radiation subsystem, after confirming that the information has leaked out.

What challenges did you encounter during your research and how did you work through these difficulties?

One challenge including determining what metric to use to quantify a high probability of decoding success. That is, mutual information is not standardly used in the literature. However, this quantity became useful because of the computational difficulties associated with other metric, like fidelity, that didn't necessarily offer any other benefits to understanding our research question. Furthermore, to ensure that the quantity I was calculating, mutual information, made sense with what was physically happening, I ensured I tested cases with known results. This helped to confirm that my model was calculating what it was intended to. These specific test cases allowed me to catch all errors.

What sparked your interest in this field?

After reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, I recognized the need for a paradigm shift. A likely step in the right direction towards such a revolution is critically thinking about black holes and how both gravity and quantum mechanics interact in such a system. While these two theories disagree, in both frameworks the laws of thermodynamics apply. Even more, the second law of thermodynamics can be mapped to a definition in information theory, such that information itself becomes a connective quantity. I was fascinated by this prospect, as information is a useful quantity to study in many different systems.

Curious about DSRF?

This project was made possible through the Deans’ Summer Research Fellowship (DSRF)—a unique opportunity for rising juniors and seniors in the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences to pursue funded summer research full-time!