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arXiv:1710.07643 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Holographic inequalities and entanglement of purification

Ning Bao, Illan F. Halpern

Published Mar 1, 2018• 80 citations
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Abstract

A bstract We study the conjectured holographic duality between entanglement of purification and the entanglement wedge cross-section. We generalize both quantities and prove several information theoretic inequalities involving them. These include upper bounds on conditional mutual information and tripartite information, as well as a lower bound for tripartite information. These inequalities are proven both holographically and for general quantum states. In addition, we use the cyclic entropy inequalities to derive a new holographic inequality for the entanglement wedge cross-section, and provide numerical evidence that the corresponding inequality for the entanglement of purification may be true in general. Finally, we use intuition from bit threads to extend the conjecture to holographic duals of suboptimal purifications.

DOI
10.1007/jhep03(2018)006

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A bstract We study the conjectured holographic duality between entanglement of purification and the entanglement wedge cross-section. We generalize both quantities and prove several information theoretic inequalities involving them. These include upper bounds on conditional mutual information and tripartite information, as well as a lower bound for tripartite information. These inequalities are proven both holographically and for general quantum states. In addition, we use the cyclic entropy inequalities to derive a new holographic inequality for the entanglement wedge cross-section, and provide numerical evidence that the corresponding inequality for the entanglement of purification may be true in general. Finally, we use intuition from bit threads to extend the conjecture to holographic duals of suboptimal purifications.
A bstract We introduce a new information-theoretic measure of multipartite correlations Δ P , by generalizing the entanglement of purification to multipartite states. We provide proofs of its various properties, focusing on several entropic inequalities, in generic quantum systems. In particular, it turns out that the multipartite entanglement of purification gives an upper bound on multipartite mutual information, which is a generalization of quantum mutual information in the spirit of relative entropy. After that, motivated by a tensor network description of the AdS/CFT correspondence, we conjecture a holographic dual of multipartite entanglement of purification Δ W , as a sum of minimal areas of codimension-2 surfaces which divide the entanglement wedge into multi-pieces. We prove that this geometrical quantity satisfies all properties we proved for the multipartite entanglement of purification. These agreements strongly support the Δ P = Δ W conjecture. We also show that the multipartite entanglement of purification is larger than multipartite squashed entanglement, which is a promising measure of multipartite quantum entanglement. We discuss potential saturation of multipartite squashed entanglement onto multipartite mutual information in holographic CFTs and its applications.
Abstract We apply the bit thread formulation of holographic entanglement entropy to reduced states describing only the geometry contained within an entanglement wedge. We argue that a certain optimized bit thread configuration, which we construct, gives a purification of the reduced state to a full holographic state obeying a precise set of conditional mutual information relations. When this purification exists, we establish, under certain assumptions, the conjectured E P = E W relation equating the entanglement of purification with the area of the minimal cross section partitioning the bulk entanglement wedge. Along the way, we comment on minimal purifications of holographic states, geometric purifications, and black hole geometries.
A bstract We argue that holographic CFT states require a large amount of tripartite entanglement, in contrast to the conjecture that their entanglement is mostly bipartite. Our evidence is that this mostly-bipartite conjecture is in sharp conflict with two well- supported conjectures about the entanglement wedge cross section surface EW . If EW is related to either the CFT’s reflected entropy or its entanglement of purification, then those quantities can differ from the mutual information at O(1GN). O\left(\frac{1}{G_N}\right). O(GN​1​). O 1 G N . We prove that this implies holographic CFT states must have O(1GN). O\left(\frac{1}{G_N}\right). O(GN​1​). O 1 G N . amounts of tripartite entanglement. This proof involves a new Fannes-type inequality for the reflected entropy, which itself has many interesting applications.
Abstract The entanglement of purification (EoP), which measures the classical correlations and entanglement of a given mixed state, has been conjectured to be dual to the area of the minimal cross section of the entanglement wedge in holography. Using the surface-state correspondence, we propose a “bit thread” formulation of the EoP. With this formulation, proofs of some known properties of the EoP are performed. Moreover, we show that the quantum advantage of dense code (QAoDC), which reflects the increase in the rate of classical information transmission through quantum channel due to entanglement, also admits a flow interpretation. In this picture, we can prove the monogamy relation of QAoDC with the EoP for tripartite states. We also derive a new lower bound for S(AB) in terms of QAoDC, which is tighter than the one given by the Araki-Lieb inequality.
To elucidate the meaning of holographic entropy inequalities (beyond subadditivity) which characterize the entanglement structure of geometric states in holography, arXiv:2309.06296 proposed the "tripartite form" for these inequalities, consisting of tripartite information and conditional tripartite information terms with unit coefficients. While this provides a compact and useful packaging of the inequalities, it is not a priori guaranteed that all inequalities can be recast in this form. Here we conjecture that they can, and present substantial evidence, by proving that the two known infinite families of holographic entropy inequalities found in arXiv:2309.15145 can indeed be written in the tripartite form. This is significant because such recasting is particularly nontrivial for these families. Apart from providing the explicit tripartite form expressions for every member of these two infinite families, we detail how we arrived at them, in the process deriving several useful identities which may serve as stepping stones to formulate further repackaging of the corresponding information quantities. We also illustrate the power of the tripartite form by proving a number of structural properties satisfied by any holographic entropy inequality.
A novel inequality involving the residual information and genuine multi-entropy was proposed in \cite{Balasubramanian:2025hxg} for tripartite holographic pure states, using which it was argued, that purely GHZ-like tripartite entanglement is not allowed in holography. In this work, we generalize this holographic signal inequality to mixed states. In a minimal extension, we compute the reflected genuine multi-entropy following \cite{Yuan:2024yfg} and find a class of holographic geometries that violate this minimally extended inequality due to a vanishing Markov gap. We can symmetrize this prescription, where instead of computing the residual information on the given mixed state ρABCρ_{ABC}ρABC​, we compute it on its canonical purification. The inequality is restored on the canonically purified state. Finally, we conjecture a new inequality for tripartite holographic states and give supporting evidence.