Terminal holographic complexity

Abstract

Abstract We introduce a quasilocal version of holographic complexity adapted to ‘terminal states’ such as spacelike singularities. We use a modification of the action-complexity ansatz, restricted to the past domain of dependence of the terminal set, and study a number of examples whose symmetry permits explicit evaluation, to conclude that this quantity enjoys monotonicity properties after the addition of appropriate counterterms. A notion of ‘complexity density’ can be defined for singularities by a coarse-graining procedure. This definition assigns finite complexity density to black hole singularities but vanishing complexity density to either generic FRW singularities or chaotic BKL singularities. We comment on the similarities and differences with Penrose’s Weyl curvature criterion.