Black Hole complexity, unscrambling, and stabilizer thermal machines

Black holes are believed to be fast scramblers of information, as they rapidly destroy local correlations and spread information throughout the system. Unscrambling this information is in principle possible, given perfect knowledge of the black hole internal dynamics[arXiv:1710.03363]. This work shows that even if one doesn't know the internal dynamics of the black hole, information can be efficiently decoded from an unknown black hole by observing the outgoing Hawking radiation. We show that, surprisingly, black holes with an unknown internal dynamics that are rapidly scrambling but not fully chaotic admit Clifford decoders: the salient properties of a scrambling unitary can be efficiently recovered even if exponentially complex. This recovery is possible because all the redundant complexity can be described as an entropy, the stabilizer entropy. We show how for non-chaotic black holes the stabilizer entropy can be efficiently pumped away, just as in a refrigerator.