## A theory of minimal updates in holography    [PDF]

Glen Evenbly, Guifre Vidal
Consider two quantum critical Hamiltonians $H$ and $\tilde{H}$ on a $d$-dimensional lattice that only differ in some region $\mathcal{R}$. We study the relation between holographic representations, obtained through real-space renormalization, of their corresponding ground states $\ket{\Psi}$ and $\ket{\tilde{\Psi}}$. We observe that, even though $\ket{\Psi}$ and $\ket{\tilde{\Psi}}$ disagree significantly both inside and outside region $\mathcal{R}$, they still admit holographic descriptions that only differ inside the past causal cone $\mathcal{C}(\mathcal{R})$ of region $\mathcal{R}$, where $\mathcal{C}(\mathcal{R})$ is obtained by coarse-graining region $\mathcal{R}$. We argue that this result follows from a notion of directed influence in the renormalization group flow that is closely connected to the success of Wilson's numerical renormalization group for impurity problems. At a practical level, directed influence allows us to exploit translation invariance when describing a homogeneous system with e.g. an impurity, in spite of the fact that the Hamiltonian is no longer invariant under translations.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0831