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arXiv:1908.02297 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Holographic entanglement entropy is cutoff-covariant

Jonathan Sorce

Published Oct 1, 2019• 9 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract In the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, it is often convenient to regulate infinite quantities in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes by introducing a sharp cutoff at some finite, large value of a particular radial coordinate. This procedure is a priori coordinate dependent, and may not be well-motivated in full, covariant general relativity; however, the fact that physically meaningful quantities such as the entanglement entropy can be obtained by such a regulation procedure suggests some underlying covariance. In this paper, we provide a careful treatment of the radial cutoff procedure for computing holographic entanglement entropy in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes. We prove two results that are frequently assumed in the literature, but that have not been carefully addressed: (i) that the choice of a “globally minimal surface” among several extremal candidates is independent of the choice of regulator, and (ii) that finite CFT quantities such as the mutual information which involve “divergence-cancelling” sums of entanglement entropies are well-defined under the usual prescription for computing covariant holographic entanglement entropy. Our results imply that the “globally minimal surface” prescription for computing the holographic entanglement entropy is well-posed from the perspective of general relativity, and thus support the widely-held belief that this is the correct prescription for identifying the entanglement wedge of a boundary subregion in AdS/CFT. We also comment on the geometric source of state-dependent divergences in the holographic entanglement entropy, and identify precisely the regime of validity of the “vacuum subtraction” protocol for regulating infinite entanglement entropies in arbitrary states by comparing them to the entanglement entropies of identical regions in the vacuum. Our proofs make use of novel techniques for the covariant analysis of extremal surfaces, which are explained in detail and may find use more broadly in the study of holographic entanglement entropy.

DOI
10.1007/jhep10(2019)015

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Abstract In the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, it is often convenient to regulate infinite quantities in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes by introducing a sharp cutoff at some finite, large value of a particular radial coordinate. This procedure is a priori coordinate dependent, and may not be well-motivated in full, covariant general relativity; however, the fact that physically meaningful quantities such as the entanglement entropy can be obtained by such a regulation procedure suggests some underlying covariance. In this paper, we provide a careful treatment of the radial cutoff procedure for computing holographic entanglement entropy in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes. We prove two results that are frequently assumed in the literature, but that have not been carefully addressed: (i) that the choice of a “globally minimal surface” among several extremal candidates is independent of the choice of regulator, and (ii) that finite CFT quantities such as the mutual information which involve “divergence-cancelling” sums of entanglement entropies are well-defined under the usual prescription for computing covariant holographic entanglement entropy. Our results imply that the “globally minimal surface” prescription for computing the holographic entanglement entropy is well-posed from the perspective of general relativity, and thus support the widely-held belief that this is the correct prescription for identifying the entanglement wedge of a boundary subregion in AdS/CFT. We also comment on the geometric source of state-dependent divergences in the holographic entanglement entropy, and identify precisely the regime of validity of the “vacuum subtraction” protocol for regulating infinite entanglement entropies in arbitrary states by comparing them to the entanglement entropies of identical regions in the vacuum. Our proofs make use of novel techniques for the covariant analysis of extremal surfaces, which are explained in detail and may find use more broadly in the study of holographic entanglement entropy.
It was proposed by Ryu and Takayanagi that the entanglement entropy in conformal field theory (CFT) is related through the AdS/CFT correspondence to the area of a minimal surface in the bulk. We apply this holographic geometrical method of calculating the entanglement entropy to study the vacuum case of a CFT which is holographically dual to empty anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. We present all possible minimal surfaces spanned on one or two spherical boundaries at AdS infinity. We give exact analytical expressions for the regularized areas of these surfaces and identify finite renormalized quantities. In the case of two disjoint boundaries the existence of two different phases of the entanglement entropy is confirmed. A trivial phase corresponds to two disconnected minimal surfaces, while the other one corresponds to a tube connecting the spherical boundaries. A transition between these phases is reminiscent of the finite temperature deconfinement transition in the CFT on the boundary. The exact analytical results are thus consistent with previous numerical and approximate computations. We also briefly discuss the character of a spacetime extension of the minimal surface spanned on two uniformly accelerated boundaries.
While the entanglement entropy of a single subregion in quantum field theory is formally infinite and requires regularization, certain combinations of entropies are perfectly finite in the limit that the regulator is removed, the mutual information being a common example. For generic regulator schemes, such as a holographic calculation with a uniform radial cutoff, these quantities show nontrivial dependence on the regulator at finite values of the cutoff. We investigate a holographic regularization scheme defined in three-dimensional anti-de Sitter space constructed from , curves in two-dimensional hyperbolic space perpendicular to all geodesics approaching a single point on the boundary, that leads to finite information measures that are cutoff independent, even at finite values of the regulator. We describe a broad class of such information measures, and describe how the field theory dual to the horocycle regulator is inherently nonlocal. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We introduce a simple geometrical construction similar to covariant holographic entanglement entropy but with the addition of a new term proportional to boundary region volume. This new procedure has properties strongly resembling classical Shannon entropy of probability distributions rather than von Neumann entropy, so we call the quantity holographic Shannon entropy. The holographic Shannon entropy of a region AAA is divergent in AdS/CFT, but upon regulation, it appears to be equal to the outer entropy of the entanglement wedge of AAA with the entanglement wedge of the complement of AAA held fixed. The construction is unambiguous when applied to compact surfaces with convex shape in general spacetimes obeying the null curvature condition (of which AdS with a regulator is a special case). In this context we prove that holographic Shannon entropy obeys monotonicity, a key property of Shannon entropy, as well as all known balanced inequalities of dynamical holographic entanglement entropy. In the static case, we explain why there must exist some classical probability distribution on random variables locally distributed on the boundary with the property that the Shannon entropies of all marginals are exactly reproduced by the holographic Shannon entropy formula.
A bstract The corrections to holographic entanglement entropy from bulk quantum fields in a classical gravitational background are now well understood. They lead, in particular, to unitary Page curves for evaporating black holes. However, the correct treatment of quantum fluctuations of the metric, including graviton excitations, is a longstanding problem. We provide a gauge-invariant prescription for the generalized entropy of gravitons in anti-de Sitter space in terms of areas and bulk entanglement entropy, generalizing the quantum extremal surface prescription to accommodate fluctuations in the semiclassical spacetime geometry. This task requires a careful treatment of the area operator on the graviton Hilbert space and the definition of a “quantum extremal gauge” in which the extremal surface is unperturbed. It also requires us to determine the correct vacuum modular Hamiltonian for the graviton field, which we fix by requiring that it doesn’t contain a boundary term in extremal gauge. We check our prescription with an explicit computation of the vacuum-subtracted generalized entropy of states containing a graviton in an AdS-Rindler background. Our results exactly match vacuum-subtracted von Neumann entropies for stress-tensor excited states in holographic conformal field theory with d > 2 dimensions. We also use covariant phase space techniques to give a partial proof of our prescription when the entanglement wedge for the background spacetime has a bifurcate Killing horizon. Along the way, we identify a class of perturbative graviton states that have parametrically larger generalized entropy, in the small G N expansion, than any low-energy excitations of an ordinary quantum field.
Abstract: \nTensor networks,ToverlineT T\\overline{T} ToverlineTTT¯, and broader notions of a holographic principle all motivate the idea that some notion of gravitational holography should persist in the presence of a radial cutoff. But in the absence of time-reflection symmetry, the areas of Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi surfaces anchored to the radial cutoff generally violate strong sub-additivity, even when the associated boundary regions are spacelike separated as defined by both bulk and boundary notions of causality. We thus propose an alternate definition of cutoff-holographic entropy using a restricted maximin prescription anchored to a codimension 2 cutoff surface. For bulk solutions that respect the null energy condition, we show that the resulting areas satisfy SSA, entanglement wedge nesting, and monogamy of mutual information in parallel with cutoff free results in AdS. These results hold even when the cutoff surface fails to be convex.
We introduce a new quantity, called pseudo-entropy, as a generalization of entanglement entropy via postselection. We expect this quantity to provide a new class of order parameters in quantum many-body systems. In the anti--de Sitter space (AdS)/conformal field theory (CFT) correspondence, this quantity is dual to areas of minimal area surfaces in time-dependent Euclidean spaces which are asymptotically AdS. We call this geometric computation of pseudo-entropy via the AdS/CFT\mathrm{AdS}/\mathrm{CFT}AdS/CFT the holographic pseudo-entropy. We study its basic properties and classifications in qubit systems. In specific examples, we provide a quantum information theoretic meaning of this new quantity as an averaged number of Bell pairs when the post-selection is performed. We also present properties of the pseudo-entropy for random states. We then calculate the pseudo-entropy in the presence of local operator excitations for both the two dimensional free massless scalar CFT and two dimensional holographic CFTs. We find a general property in CFTs that the pseudo-entropy is highly reduced when the local operators get closer to the boundary of the subsystem. We also compute the holographic pseudo-entropy for a Janus solution, dual to an exactly marginal perturbation of a two dimensional CFT and find its agreement with a perturbative calculation in the dual CFT. We show the linearity property holds for holographic states, where the holographic pseudo-entropy coincides with a weak value of the area operator. Finally, we propose a mixed state generalization of pseudo-entropy and give its gravity dual.