Eur. Phys. J. C (2017) 77:904
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-017-5466-5
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Complexity growth rates for AdS black holes in massive gravity
and f (R) gravity
Wen-Di Guo
a
, Shao-Wen Wei
b
, Yan-Yan Li
c
, Yu-Xiao Liu
d
Institute of Theoretical Physics, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, People’s Republic of China
Received: 23 August 2017 / Accepted: 13 December 2017 / Published online: 26 December 2017
© The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication
Abstract The “complexity = action” duality states that the
quantum complexity is equal to the action of the station-
ary AdS black hole within the Wheeler–DeWitt patch at late
time approximation. We compute the action growth rates of
the neutral and charged black holes in massive gravity and
the neutral, charged and Kerr–Newman black holes in f (R)
gravity to test this conjecture. Besides, we investigate the
effects of the massive graviton terms, higher derivative terms
and the topology of the black hole horizon on the complexity
growth rate.
1 Introduction
The quantum computational complexity was recently pro-
posed by Susskind et al. [1–5] for the first time. They con-
nected the black hole interior with the quantum computa-
tional complexity, which was defined as the minimal number
of elementary operations (also named quantum gates) on con-
structing the boundary quantum state from a reference quan-
tum state [4,5]. This is a remarkable progress on understand-
ing black hole interior. After that, the quantum complexity
has been extensively investigated [6–29]. The gravitational
action with null boundaries was proposed and discussed in
detail in Ref. [8], and the connection between the second
law of thermodynamics with the quantum complexity was
investigated in Ref. [19].
Stanford and Susskind first related the complexity C with
the spatial volume V of the Einstein–Rosen bridge which
connects two boundaries as [30]
C ∼
V
GL
, (1)
a
e-mail: guowd14@lzu.edu.cn
b
e-mail: weishw@lzu.edu.cn
c
e-mail: liyy2015@lzu.edu.cn
d
e-mail: liuyx@lzu.edu.cn
where G is the Newton constant and L is a length scale
that should be chosen to be either the Anti-de Sitter
(AdS) radius or the radius of the black hole horizon.
This conjecture, named Complexity-Volume (CV) dual-
ity, has a lot of nice features and it has been tested in
the shock wave geometries [5]. It is worthwhile noting
that the length scale L should be chosen according to
the explicit situation. The subsequent Complexity-Action
(CA) duality does not involve any ambiguous quantities
and preserves all the good features of the CV duality [5].
The CA duality relates the quantum complexity to the
action of the black hole in the Wheeler–DeWitt (WDW)
patch:
C =
A
π
¯
h
. (2)
The authors of Ref. [15] revisited the connection between the
thermodynamical volume of the black hole and the action
growth rate in the WDW patch at late time approxima-
tion. The UV divergence of the action in that region was
investigated in Refs. [10,17]. It was pointed out by Lloyd
that the quantum complexity growth rate is bounded by
[31]
dC
dt
≤
2E
π
¯
h
, (3)
where E is the average energy of the quantum state relat-
ing to the ground state. If the CA duality is correct,
the action growth rates of the black holes in the WDW
patch will also be bounded. This was tested by com-
puting the action growth rate. And some concrete forms
of the action growth rate of the AdS black holes in the
WDW patch at the late time approximation were proposed
[4,5].
However, the authors of Ref. [32] found that the above
bound will be violated for both small and large charged static
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