We study holographic subregion volume complexity for a line segment in the AdS$_3$ Vaidya geometry. On the field theory side, this gravity background corresponds to a sudden quench which leads to the thermalization of the strongly-coupled dual conformal field theory. We find the time-dependent extremal volume surface by numerically solving a partial differential equation with boundary condition given by the Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi surface, and we use this solution to compute holographic subregion complexity as a function of time. Approximate analytical expressions valid at early and at late times are derived.
We investigate general features of the evolution of holographic subregion complexity (HSC) on Vaidya-AdS metric with a general form. The spacetime is dual to a sudden quench process in quantum system and HSC is a measure of the ``difference between two mixed states. Based on the subregion CV (Complexity equals Volume) conjecture and in the large size limit, we extract out three distinct stages during the evolution of HSC: the stage of linear growth at the early time, the stage of linear growth with a slightly small rate during the intermediate time and the stage of linear decrease at the late time. The growth rates of the first two stages are compared with the Lloyd bound. We find that with some choices of certain parameter, the Lloyd bound is always saturated at the early time, while at the intermediate stage, the growth rate is always less than the Lloyd bound. Moreover, the fact that the behavior of CV conjecture and its version of the subregion in Vaidya spacetime implies that they are different even in the large size limit.
We study the volume prescription of the holographic subregion complexity in a holographic 5 dimensional model consisting of Einstein gravity coupled to a scalar field with a non-trivial potential. The dual 4 dimensional gauge theory is not conformal and exhibits a RG flow between two different fixed points. In both zero and finite temperature we show that the holographic subregion complexity can be used as a measure of non-conformality of the model. This quantity exhibits also a monotonic behaviour in terms of the size of the entangling region, like the behaviour of the entanglement entropy in this setup. There is also a finite jump due to the disentangling transition between connected and disconnected minimal surfaces for holographic renormalized subregion complexity at zero temperature.
We compute the holographic entanglement entropy and subregion complexity of spherical boundary subregions in the uncharged and charged AdS black hole backgrounds, with the textbf{change} in these quantities being defined with respect to the pure AdS result. This calculation is done perturbatively in the parameter $frac{R}{z_{rm h}}$, where $z_{rm h}$ is the black hole horizon and $R$ is the radius of the entangling region. We provide analytic formulae for these quantities as functions of the boundary spacetime dimension $d$ including several orders higher than previously computed. We observe that the change in entanglement entropy has definite sign at each order and subregion complexity has a negative sign relative to entanglement entropy at each of those orders (except at first order or in three spacetime dimensions, where it vanishes identically). We combine pre-existing work on the complexity equals volume conjecture and the conjectured relationship between Fisher information and bulk entanglement to suggest a refinement of the so-called first law of entanglement thermodynamics by introducing a work term associated with complexity. This extends the previously proposed first law, which held to first order, to one which holds to second order. We note that the proposed relation does not hold to third order and speculate on the existence of additional information-theoretic quantities that may also play a role.
We present a kind of generalized Vaidya solutions in a generic Lovelock gravity. This solution generalizes the simple case in Gauss-Bonnet gravity reported recently by some authors. We study the thermodynamics of apparent horizon in this generalized Vaidya spacetime. Treating those terms except for the Einstein tensor as an effective energy-momentum tensor in the gravitational field equations, and using the unified first law in Einstein gravity theory, we obtain an entropy expression for the apparent horizon. We also obtain an energy expression of this spacetime, which coincides with the generalized Misner-Sharp energy proposed by Maeda and Nozawa in Lovelock gravity.
We numerically investigate the evolution of the holographic subregion complexity during a quench process in Einstein-Born-Infeld theory. Based on the subregion CV conjecture, we argue that the subregion complexity can be treated as a probe to explore the interior of the black hole. The effects of the nonlinear parameter and the charge on the evolution of the holographic subregion complexity are also investigated. When the charge is sufficiently large, it not only changes the evolution pattern of the subregion complexity, but also washes out the second stage featured by linear growth.