Notes on the Causal Structure in a Tensor Network

TL;DR

This paper explores Lorentzian tensor networks to model exotic spacetimes like black holes, defining reference frames and Lorentz transformations, and demonstrating how key relativistic phenomena can emerge from these quantum structures.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for Lorentzian tensor networks incorporating reference frames and Lorentz transformations, capturing phenomena like the Unruh effect within tensor network models.

Findings

Constructed simple Lorentzian tensor network examples.

Demonstrated the emergence of linear dispersion relations.

Captured key relativistic effects such as the Unruh effect.

Abstract

In this paper we attempt to understand Lorentzian tensor networks, as a preparation for constructing tensor networks that can describe more exotic backgrounds such as black holes. To define notions of reference frames and switching of reference frames on a tensor network, we will borrow ideas from the algebraic quantum field theory literature. With these definitions, we construct simple examples of Lorentzian tensor networks and solve the spectrum for a choice of ``inertial frame'' based on Gaussian models of fermions and integrable models. In particular, the tensor network can be viewed as a periodically driven Floquet system, that by-pass the ``doubling problem'' and gives rise to fermions with exactly linear dispersion relations. We will find that a boost operator connecting different inertial frames, and notions of ``Rindler observers'' can be defined, and that important physics in Lorentz invariant QFT, such as the Unruh effect, can be captured by such skeleton of spacetime. We find interesting subtleties when the same approach is directly applied to bosons -- the operator algebra contains commutators that take the wrong sign -- resembling bosons behind horizons.