Entanglement asymmetry in the Hayden-Preskill protocol

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the time evolution of entanglement asymmetry of the black hole radiation in the Hayden-Preskill thought experiment. We assume the black hole is initially in a mixed state since it is entangled with the early radiation. Alice throws a diary maximally entangled with a reference system into the black hole. After the black hole has absorbed the diary, Bob tries to recover the information that Alice thought should be destroyed by the black hole. In this protocol, we found that a U(1) symmetry of the radiation emerges before a certain transition time (the time when the vanishing entanglement asymmetry begins to grow). This emergent symmetry is exact in the thermodynamic limit and can be characterized by the vanishing entanglement asymmetry of the radiation. The transition time depends on the initial entropy and the size of the diary. What is more, when the initial state of the black hole is maximally mixed, this emergent symmetry survives during the whole procedure of the black hole radiation. We successfully explained this novel phenomenon using the decoupling inequality. Published by the American Physical Society 2025