Abstract We introduce a unifying framework for the construction of holographic tensor networks, based on the theory of hyperbolic buildings. The underlying dualities relate a bulk space to a boundary which can be homeomorphic to a sphere, but also to more general spaces like a Menger sponge type fractal. In this general setting, we give a precise construction of a large family of bulk regions that satisfy complementary recovery. For these regions, our networks obey a Ryu-Takayanagi formula. The areas of Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces are controlled by the Hausdorff dimension of the boundary, and consistently generalize the behavior of holographic entanglement entropy in integer dimensions to the non-integer case. Our construction recovers HaPPY-like codes in all dimensions, and generalizes the geometry of Bruhat-Tits trees. It also provides examples of infinite-dimensional nets of holographic conditional expectations, and opens a path towards the study of conformal field theory and holography on fractal spaces.
Abstract We introduce a unifying framework for the construction of holographic tensor networks, based on the theory of hyperbolic buildings. The underlying dualities relate a bulk space to a boundary which can be homeomorphic to a sphere, but also to more general spaces like a Menger sponge type fractal. In this general setting, we give a precise construction of a large family of bulk regions that satisfy complementary recovery. For these regions, our networks obey a Ryu-Takayanagi formula. The areas of Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces are controlled by the Hausdorff dimension of the boundary, and consistently generalize the behavior of holographic entanglement entropy in integer dimensions to the non-integer case. Our construction recovers HaPPY-like codes in all dimensions, and generalizes the geometry of Bruhat-Tits trees. It also provides examples of infinite-dimensional nets of holographic conditional expectations, and opens a path towards the study of conformal field theory and holography on fractal spaces.
Tensor networks provide a natural framework for exploring holographic duality because they obey entanglement area laws. They have been used to construct explicit toy models realizing many of the interesting structural features of the AdS/CFT correspondence, including the non-uniqueness of bulk operator reconstruction in the boundary theory. In this article, we explore the holographic properties of networks of random tensors. We find that our models naturally incorporate many features that are analogous to those of the AdS/CFT correspondence. When the bond dimension of the tensors is large, we show that the entanglement entropy of all boundary regions, whether connected or not, obey the Ryu-Takayanagi entropy formula, a fact closely related to known properties of the multipartite entanglement of assistance. We also discuss the behavior of Rényi entropies in our models and contrast it with AdS/CFT. Moreover, we find that each boundary region faithfully encodes the physics of the entire bulk entanglement wedge, i.e., the bulk region enclosed by the boundary region and the minimal surface. Our method is to interpret the average over random tensors as the partition function of a classical ferromagnetic Ising model, so that the minimal surfaces of Ryu-Takayanagi appear as domain walls. Upon including the analog of a bulk field, we find that our model reproduces the expected corrections to the Ryu-Takayanagi formula: the bulk minimal surface is displaced and the entropy is augmented by the entanglement of the bulk field. Increasing the entanglement of the bulk field ultimately changes the minimal surface behavior topologically, in a way similar to the effect of creating a black hole. Extrapolating bulk correlation functions to the boundary permits the calculation of the scaling dimensions of boundary operators, which exhibit a large gap between a small number of low-dimension operators and the rest. While we are primarily motivated by the AdS/CFT duality, the main results of the article define a more general form of bulk-boundary correspondence which could be useful for extending holography to other spacetimes.
We present a general procedure for constructing tensor networks that accurately reproduce holographic states in conformal field theories (CFTs). Given a state in a large-N CFT with a static, semiclassical gravitational dual, we build a tensor network by an iterative series of approximations that eliminate redundant degrees of freedom and minimize the bond dimensions of the resulting network. We argue that the bond dimensions of the tensor network will match the areas of the corresponding bulk surfaces. For “tree” tensor networks (i.e., those that are constructed by discretizing spacetime with nonintersecting Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces), our arguments can be made rigorous using a version of one-shot entanglement distillation in the CFT. Using the known quantum error correcting properties of AdS/CFT, we show that bulk legs can be added to the tensor networks to create holographic quantum error correcting codes. These codes behave similarly to previous holographic tensor network toy models, but describe actual bulk excitations in continuum AdS/CFT. By assuming some natural generalizations of the “holographic entanglement of purification” conjecture, we are able to construct tensor networks for more general bulk discretizations, leading to finer-grained networks that partition the information content of a Ryu-Takayanagi surface into tensor-factorized subregions. While the granularity of such a tensor network must be set larger than the string/Planck scales, we expect that it can be chosen to lie well below the AdS scale. However, we also prove a no-go theorem which shows that the bulk-to-boundary maps cannot all be isometries in a tensor network with intersecting Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces.
Holographic tensor networks serve as toy models for the Anti-de Sitter/Conformal Field Theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence, capturing many of its essential features in a concrete manner. However, existing holographic tensor network models remain far from a complete theory of quantum gravity. A key obstacle is their discrete structure, which only approximates the semi-classical geometry of gravity in a qualitative sense. In \cite{Lin:2024dho}, it was shown that a network of partial-entanglement-entropy (PEE) threads, which are bulk geodesics with a specific density distribution, generates a perfect tessellation of AdS space. Moreover, such PEE-network tessellations can be constructed for more highly symmetric geometries using the Crofton formula. In this paper, we assign a quantum state to each vertex in the PEE network and develop several holographic tensor network models: (1) the factorized PEE tensor network, which takes the form of a tensor product of EPR pairs; (2) the HaPPY-like PEE tensor network constructed from perfect tensors; and (3) the random PEE tensor network. In all these models, we reproduce the exact Ryu-Takayanagi formula by showing that the minimal number of cuts along a homologous surface in the network exactly equals the area of that surface.
A bstract We present a general procedure for constructing tensor networks that accurately reproduce holographic states in conformal field theories (CFTs). Given a state in a large- N CFT with a static, semiclassical gravitational dual, we build a tensor network by an iterative series of approximations that eliminate redundant degrees of freedom and minimize the bond dimensions of the resulting network. We argue that the bond dimensions of the tensor network will match the areas of the corresponding bulk surfaces. For “tree” tensor networks (i.e., those that are constructed by discretizing spacetime with non intersecting Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces), our arguments can be made rigorous using a version of one-shot entanglement distillation in the CFT. Using the known quantum error correcting properties of AdS/CFT, we show that bulk legs can be added to the tensor networks to create holographic quantum error correcting codes. These codes behave similarly to previous holographic tensor network toy models, but describe actual bulk excitations in continuum AdS/CFT. By assuming some natural generalizations of the “holographic entanglement of purification” conjecture, we are able to construct tensor networks for more general bulk discretizations, leading to finer-grained networks that partition the information content of a Ryu-Takayanagi surface into tensor-factorized subregions. While the granularity of such a tensor network must be set larger than the string/Planck scales, we expect that it can be chosen to lie well below the AdS scale. However, we also prove a no-go theorem which shows that the bulk-to-boundary maps cannot all be isometries in a tensor network with intersecting Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces.
A bstract We discuss a one-parameter family of states in two-dimensional holographic conformal field theories which are constructed via the Euclidean path integral of an effective theory on a family of hyperbolic slices in the dual bulk geometry. The effective theory in question is the CFT flowed under a TT T T ¯ deformation, which “folds” the boundary CFT towards the bulk time-reflection symmetric slice. We propose that these novel Euclidean path integral states in the CFT can be interpreted as continuous tensor network (CTN) states. We argue that these CTN states satisfy a Ryu-Takayanagi-like minimal area upper bound on the entanglement entropies of boundary intervals, with the coefficient being equal to 4GN1 1 4 G N ; the CTN corresponding to the bulk time-reflection symmetric slice saturates this bound. We also argue that the original state of the CFT can be written as a superposition of such CTN states, with the corresponding wavefunction being the bulk Hartle-Hawking wavefunction.
We propose a framework for preparing quantum states with a holographic entanglement structure, in the sense that the entanglement entropies are governed by minimal surfaces in a chosen bulk geometry. We refer to such entropies as holographic because they obey a relation between entropies and bulk minimal surfaces, known as the Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) formula, that is a key feature of holographic models of quantum gravity. Typically in such models, the bulk geometry is determined by solving Einstein's equations. Here, we simply choose a bulk geometry, then discretize the geometry into a coupling graph comprising bulk and boundary nodes. Evolving under this graph of interactions and measuring the bulk nodes leaves behind the desired pure state on the boundary. We numerically demonstrate that the resulting entanglement properties approximately reproduce the predictions of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula in the chosen bulk geometry. We consider graphs associated with hyperbolic disk and wormhole geometries, but the approach is general. We also introduce a procedure for decorating the graph which, when applied to the hyperbolic disk, yields a genuine CFT ground state with power-law correlations but which only partially obeys RT. The minimal ingredients in our proposal involve only Gaussian operations and measurements and are readily implementable in photonic and cold-atom platforms.