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In this talk I am going to describe Spekkens’ toy model, a non-contextual hidden variable model with an epistemic restriction, a constraint on what an observer can know about reality. The aim of the model, developed for continuous and discrete prime degrees of freedom, is to advocate the epistemic view of quantum theory, where quantum states are states of incomplete knowledge about a deeper underlying reality. In spite of its classical flavour, many aspects that were thought to belong only to quantum mechanics can be reproduced in the model. 

I am going to describe our results regarding the formulation of rules for the update of states after measurement. I will do it for systems of discrete prime dimensions and I will then give the idea on how to proceed in the non-prime dimensional case. 

I will also depict the relationship between Spekkens’ model, stabiliser quantum mechanics and Gross' theory of discrete Wigner functions (they are equivalent theories in odd dimensions) in terms of measurement update rules.

I will conclude by briefly discussing a project we have been recently working on that consists of characterising sub theories of Spekkens’ model that are operationally equivalent to sub theories of QM (in particular in the case of qubits) and use them to represent the non-contextual classically simulable part of state-injection schemes of computation with contextuality as a resource.

I will propose a new class of tensor network state as a model for the AdS/CFT correspondence and holography. This class shall be demonstrated to retain key features of the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA), in that they describe quantum states with algebraic correlation functions, have free variational parameters, and are efficiently contractible. Yet, unlike MERA, they are built according to a uniform tiling of hyperbolic space, without inherent directionality or preferred locations in the holographic bulk, and thus circumvent key arguments made against the MERA as a model for AdS/CFT. Novel holographic features of this tensor network class will be examined, such as an equivalence between the causal cone C[R] and the entanglement wedge E[R] of connected boundary regions R.

We will describe how the reconstruction of a bulk operator can be organised systematically. With a suitable parametrisation, an analogue of the HKLL formula emerges, involving a smearing function satisfying a Klein Gordon equation in the graph. The parametrisation also allows us to read off interaction vertices, and build up loop diagrams systematically. When we interpret the Bruhat-Tits tree as a tensor network, we recover (partially) features of the p-adic AdS/CFT dictionary discussed recently in the literature.

In this talk I discuss the problem of introducing dynamics for holographic codes. To do this it is necessary to take a continuum limit of the holographic code. As I argue, a convenient kinematical continuum limit space is given by Jones’ semicontinuous limit. Dynamics are then furnished by a unitary representation of a discrete analogue of the conformal group known as Thompson’s group T. I will describe these representations in detail in the simplest case of a discrete AdS geometry modelled by trees. Consequences such as the ER=EPR argument are then realised in this setup. Extensions to more general tessellations with a MERA structure are possible, and will be (very) briefly sketched.

Tensor network is a constructive description of many-body quantum entangled states starting from few-body building blocks. Random tensor networks provide useful models that naturally incorporate various important features of holographic duality, such as the Ryu-Takayanagi formula for entropy-area relation, and operator correspondence between bulk and boundary. In this talk I will overview the setup and key properties of random tensor networks, and then discuss how to describe quantum superposition of geometries in this formalism. By introducing quantum link variables, we show that random tensor networks on all geometries form an overcomplete basis of the boundary Hilbert space, such that each boundary state can be mapped to a superposition of (spatial) geometries. We discuss how small fluctuations around each geometry forms a “code subspace” in which bulk operators can be mapped to boundary isometrically. We further compute the overlap between distinct geometries, and show that the overlap is suppressed exponentially in an area law fashion, in consistency with the holographic principle. In summary, random tensor networks on all geometries form an overcomplete basis of “holographic coherent states” which may provide a new starting point for describing quantum gravity physics. References [1] Patrick Hayden, Sepehr Nezami, Xiao-Liang Qi, Nathaniel Thomas, Michael Walter, Zhao Yang, JHEP 11 (2016) 009 [2] Xiao-Liang Qi, Zhao Yang, Yi-Zhuang You, arxiv:1703.06533

According to a recent proposal, in the AdS/CFT correspondence the circuit complexity of a CFT state is dual to the Einstein-Hilbert action of a certain region in the dual space-time. If the proposal is correct, it should be possible to derive Einstein's equations by varying the complexity in a class of circuits that prepare the requisite CFT state. This talk attempts such a derivation in very special settings: Virasoro descendants of the CFT2 ground state, which are dual to locally AdS3 geometries. By applying Tensor Network Renormalization to the discretized Euclidean path integral that prepares the CFT state, I will justify the recent suggestion by Caputa et al. that the complexity of a path integral is quantified by the Liouville action. The Liouville field specifies the conformal frame in which the path integral is evaluated; in the most efficient / least complexity frame, the Liouville field is closely related to entanglement entropies of CFT2 intervals. Assuming the Ryu-Takayanagi proposal, the said entanglement entropies are lengths of geodesics living in the dual space-time. The Liouville equation of motion satisfied by the minimal complexity Liouville field is a geodesic-wise rewriting of the non-linear vacuum Einstein's equations in 3d with a negative cosmological constant. I emphasize that this is very much work in progress; I hope the audience will help me to sharpen the arguments.