Reconstruction Support and Island Dominance in Black-Hole Information Recovery
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The island formula recovers a unitary Page curve in controlled gravitational models, but the dominance of an island saddle, the existence of a radiation recovery channel, and the cost of implementing that channel are logically distinct statements. We formulate this distinction as a two-stage framework. In the first stage, candidate islands and the physical Page transition are determined exclusively by the standard generalized entropy and quantum-extremal-surface (QES) prescription. In the second stage, an explicitly model-dependent reconstruction score ranks the QES candidates by normalized recovery, connectivity, algebraic, and complexity diagnostics. The score is not proposed as a new gravitational entropy formula. For a nondegenerate island/no-island crossing we derive the first- and second-order displacement of the operational reconstruction-support transition relative to the Page transition. We define operator recovery on a code subspace without assuming an interior–exterior tensor factorization, state the Fawzi–Renner recoverability implication with its correct conditional-mutual-information hypothesis, and derive a dimension-normalized mutual-information network diagnostic bounded in 0,1. We then test the diagnostics in a fully reproducible random-Clifford evaporation model. A self-contained binary stabilizer calculation uses n = 12, 16, and 20 black-hole qubits and 256 seeded realizations per size and ensemble. The entropy peak converges to an emitted fraction k/n = 1/2, whereas a reference qubit becomes equally correlated with radiation and the remaining register near the same point. A stricter decoupling criterion occurs later. Pairwise radiation–network connectivity and multipartite total correlation exhibit sharply different behavior, demonstrating that a pairwise network cannot by itself certify interior reconstruction. These results support reconstruction support as an operational layer placed on top of—not inside—the island rule, and they give falsifiable criteria for future tensor-network, random-circuit, and semiclassical calculations.
Source: Quantum Reports
Author: Haifeng Ding
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,689
OpenAlex ID: W7211880103