Efficient decoding for the Hayden-Preskill protocol

Abstract

We present two particular decoding procedures for reconstructing a quantum state from the Hawking radiation in the Hayden-Preskill thought experiment. We work in an idealized setting and represent the black hole and its entangled partner by $n$ EPR pairs. The first procedure teleports the state thrown into the black hole to an outside observer by post-selecting on the condition that a sufficient number of EPR pairs remain undisturbed. The probability of this favorable event scales as $1/d_{A}^2$, where $d_A$ is the Hilbert space dimension for the input state. The second procedure is deterministic and combines the previous idea with Grover's search. The decoding complexity is $\mathcal{O}(d_{A}\mathcal{C})$ where $\mathcal{C}$ is the size of the quantum circuit implementing the unitary evolution operator $U$ of the black hole. As with the original (non-constructive) decoding scheme, our algorithms utilize scrambling, where the decay of out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) guarantees faithful state recovery.