Complexity for link complement States in Chern Simons Theory

Abstract

We study notions of complexity for link complement states in Chern Simons theory with compact gauge group $G$. Such states are obtained by the Euclidean path integral on the complement of $n$-component links inside a 3-manifold $M_3$. For the Abelian theory at level $k$ we find that a natural set of fundamental gates exists and one can identify the complexity as differences of linking numbers modulo $k$. Such linking numbers can be viewed as coordinates which embeds all link complement states into $\mathbb{Z}_k ^{\otimes n(n-1)/2}$ and the complexity is identified as the distance with respect to a particular norm. For non-Abelian Chern Simons theories, the situation is much more complicated. We focus here on torus link states and show that the problem can be reduced to defining complexity for a single knot complement state. We suggest a systematic way to choose a set of minimal universal generators for single knot complement states and then evaluate the complexity using such generators. A detailed illustration is shown for $SU(2)_k$ Chern Simons theory and the results can be extended to general compact gauge group.