Quantum gravity tomography

Abstract

The holographic principle posits that all quantum information in a region of spacetime is encoded on its boundary. While there is strong evidence for this principle in certain models of quantum gravity in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetime, it is yet to be established whether holography is a generic feature of quantum gravity, or a peculiar property of these models. The goal of the present work is to present a model of holographic reconstruction in the framework of perturbative quantum gravity in flat spacetime. Specifically, we consider a state in the single-particle sector of a quantum field theory and give a method to completely reconstruct the quantum state from measurement of the metric at spatial infinity. Our argument uses a relativistic generalization of the quantum-mechanical Wigner function, and gives an explicit mechanism by which the gravitational constraints encode quantum information holographically on the boundary. Moreover, it suggests how information about more general states might be recovered from soft charges at null infinity, with applications to the black hole information loss paradox.