We revisit the complexity=action proposal for charged black holes. We investigate the complexity for a dyonic black hole, and we find the surprising feature that the late-time growth is sensitive to the ratio between electric and magnetic charges. In particular, the late-time growth rate vanishes when the black hole carries only a magnetic charge. If the dyonic black hole is perturbed by a light shock wave, a similar feature appears for the switchback effect, e.g., it is absent for purely magnetic black holes. We then show how the inclusion of a surface term to the action can put the electric and magnetic charges on an equal footing, or more generally change the value of the late-time growth rate. Next, we investigate how the causal structure influences the late-time growth with and without the surface term for charged black holes in a family of Einstein-Maxwell-Dilaton theories. Finally, we connect the previous discussion to the complexity=action proposal for the two-dimensional Jackiw-Teitelboim theory. Since the two-dimensional theory is obtained by a dimensional reduction from Einstein-Maxwell theory in higher dimensions in a near-extremal and near-horizon limit, the choices of parent action and parent background solution determine the behaviour of holographic complexity in two dimensions. arXiv:1901.00014v1 [hep-th] 31 Dec 2018 1 A more sophisticated approach to choosing the latter scale was described in [19].

We present a new method for reconstructing CFT duals of states excited by the bulk local operators in the three dimensional AdS black holes in the AdS/CFT context. As an important procedure for this, we introduce a map between the bulk points in AdS and those on the boundary where CFT lives. This gives a systematic and universal way to express bulk local states even inside black hole interiors. Our construction allows us to probe the interior structures of black holes purely from the CFT calculations. We analyze bulk local states in the single-sided black holes as well as the double-sided black holes.

Quantum extremal islands reproduce the unitary Page curve of an evaporating black hole. This has been derived by including replica wormholes in the gravitational path integral, but for the transient, evaporating black holes most relevant to Hawking’s paradox, these wormholes have not been analyzed in any detail. In this paper we study replica wormholes for black holes formed by gravitational collapse in Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity, and confirm that they lead to the island rule for the entropy. The main technical challenge is that replica wormholes rely on a Euclidean path integral, while the quantum extremal islands of an evaporating black hole exist only in Lorentzian signature. Furthermore, the Euclidean equations for the Schwarzian mode are non-local, so it is unclear how to connect to the local, Lorentzian dynamics of an evaporating black hole. We address these issues with Schwinger-Keldysh techniques and show how the non-local equations reduce to the local ‘boundary particle’ description in special cases.

Bulk localized excited states in an AdS spacetime can be constructed from Ishibashi states with respect to the global conformal symmetry in the dual CFT. We study boundary two point functions of primary operators in the presence of bulk localized excitations in two dimensional CFTs. From two point functions in holographic CFTs, we observe causal propagations of radiations when the mass of dual bulk scalar field is close to the BF bound. This behavior for holographic CFTs is consistent with the locality and causality in classical gravity duals. We also show that this cannot be seen in free fermion CFTs. Moreover, we find that the short distance behavior of two point functions is universal and obeys the relation which generalizes the first law of entanglement entropy.