Abstract We extend the results of arXiv:2209.12903 by studying local projective measurements performed on subregions of two copies of a CFT2 in the thermofield double state and investigating their consequences on the bulk double-sided black hole holographic dual. We focus on CFTs defined on an infinite line and consider measurements of both finite and semi-infinite subregions. In the former case, the connectivity of the bulk spacetime is preserved after the measurement. In the latter case, the measurement of two semi-infinite intervals in one CFT or of one semi-infinite interval in each CFT can destroy the Einstein-Rosen bridge and disconnect the bulk dual spacetime. In particular, we find that a transition between a connected and disconnected phase occurs depending on the relative size of the measured and unmeasured subregions and on the specific Cardy state the measured subregions are projected on. We identify this phase transition as an entangled/disentangled phase transition of the dual CFT system by computing the post-measurement holographic entanglement entropy between the two CFTs. We also find that bulk information encoded in one CFT in the absence of measurement can sometimes be reconstructed from the other CFT when a measurement is performed, or can be erased by the measurement. Finally, we show that a purely CFT calculation of the Renyi entropy using the replica trick yields results compatible with those obtained in our bulk analysis.
Abstract We extend the results of arXiv:2209.12903 by studying local projective measurements performed on subregions of two copies of a CFT2 in the thermofield double state and investigating their consequences on the bulk double-sided black hole holographic dual. We focus on CFTs defined on an infinite line and consider measurements of both finite and semi-infinite subregions. In the former case, the connectivity of the bulk spacetime is preserved after the measurement. In the latter case, the measurement of two semi-infinite intervals in one CFT or of one semi-infinite interval in each CFT can destroy the Einstein-Rosen bridge and disconnect the bulk dual spacetime. In particular, we find that a transition between a connected and disconnected phase occurs depending on the relative size of the measured and unmeasured subregions and on the specific Cardy state the measured subregions are projected on. We identify this phase transition as an entangled/disentangled phase transition of the dual CFT system by computing the post-measurement holographic entanglement entropy between the two CFTs. We also find that bulk information encoded in one CFT in the absence of measurement can sometimes be reconstructed from the other CFT when a measurement is performed, or can be erased by the measurement. Finally, we show that a purely CFT calculation of the Renyi entropy using the replica trick yields results compatible with those obtained in our bulk analysis.
Abstract Holography has taught us that spacetime is emergent and its properties depend on the entanglement structure of the dual theory. In this paper, we describe how changes in the entanglement due to a local projective measurement (LPM) on a subregion A of the boundary theory modify the bulk dual spacetime. We find that LPMs destroy portions of the bulk geometry, yielding post-measurement bulk spacetimes dual to the complementary unmeasured region Ac that are cut off by end-of-the-world branes. Using a bulk calculation in AdS3 and tensor network models of holography (in particular, the HaPPY code and random tensor networks), we show that the portions of the bulk geometry that are preserved after the measurement depend on the size of A and the state we project onto. The post-measurement bulk dual to Ac includes regions that were originally part of the entanglement wedge of A prior to measurement. This suggests that LPMs performed on a boundary subregion A teleport part of the bulk information originally encoded in A into the complementary region Ac. In semiclassical holography an arbitrary amount of bulk information can be teleported in this way, while in tensor network models the teleported information is upper-bounded by the amount of entanglement shared between A and Ac due to finite-N effects. When A is the union of two disjoint subregions, the measurement triggers an entangled/disentangled phase transition between the remaining two unmeasured subregions, corresponding to a connected/disconnected phase transition in the bulk description. Our results shed new light on the effects of measurement on the entanglement structure of holographic theories and give insight on how bulk information can be manipulated from the boundary theory. They could also represent a first step towards a holographic description of measurement-induced phase transitions.
Abstract According to holography, entanglement is the building block of spacetime; therefore, drastic changes of entanglement will lead to interesting transitions in the dual spacetime. In this paper, we study the effect of projective measurements on the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model’s thermofield double state, dual to an eternal black hole in Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity. We calculate the (Renyi-2) mutual information between the two copies of the SYK model upon projective measurement of a subset of fermions in one copy. We propose a dual JT gravity model that can account for the change of entanglement due to measurement, and observe an entanglement wedge phase transition in the von Neumann entropy. The entanglement wedge for the unmeasured side changes from the region outside the horizon to include the entire time reversal invariant slice of the two-sided geometry as the number of measured Majorana fermions increases. Therefore, after the transition, the bulk information stored in the measured subsystem is not entirely lost upon projection in one copy of the SYK model, but rather teleported to the other copy. We further propose a decoding protocol to elucidate the teleportation interpretation, and connect our analysis to the physics of traversable wormholes.
Abstract In this paper, we study a holographic description of weak measurements in conformal field theories (CFTs). Weak measurements can be viewed as a soft projection that interpolates between an identity operator and a projection operator, and can induce an effective central charge distinct from the unmeasured CFT. We model the weak measurement by an interface brane, separating different geometries dual to the post-measurement state and the unmeasured CFT, respectively. In an infinite system, the weak measurement is related to ICFT via a spacetime rotation. We find that the holographic entanglement entropy with twist operators located on the defect is consistent in both calculations for ICFT and weak measurements. We additionally calculate the boundary entropy via holographic entanglement as well as partition function. In a finite system, the weak measurement can lead to a rich phase diagram: for marginal measurements the emergent brane separates two AdS geometries, while for irrelevant measurements the post-measurement geometry features an AdS spacetime and a black hole spacetime that are separated by the brane. Although the measurement is irrelevant in the later phase, the post-measurement geometry can realize a Python’s lunch. Finally, we discuss the thick brane construction for measurement and higher-dimension extensions of our model. For these general cases, our results above are still shown to be valid.
Abstract In this paper, we consider the evolution of the thermofield-double state under the double-traced operator that connects its both sides. We will compute the entanglement entropy of the resulting state using the replica trick for the large N field theory. To leading order, it can be computed from the two-point function of the theory, where, in CFTs, it is fixed by the symmetries. Due to the exponential decay of the interaction, the entanglement entropy saturates about the thermal time after the interaction is on. Next, we restrict ourselves to one dimension and assume that the theory at strong coupling is effectively described by the Schwarzian action. We then compute the coarse-grained entropy of the resulting state using the four-point function. The equality of the two entropies implies that the double-traced operators in our theory act coherently. In AdS/CFT correspondence where the thermofield-double state corresponds to a two-sided black hole, the action of a double-traced operator corresponds to shrinking or expanding the black hole in the bulk.
The relationship between Bekenstein-Hawking and entanglement entropy is one \nof the most intriguing problems of black hole and theoretical physics. Although both entropies have the same geometric characterization (they scale as an area), they have a different origin. The Bekenstein-Hawking entropy has it’s roots in the thermal correlations whereas the entanglement entropy describes the quantum correlations. In this thesis we address this problem from a holographic \nperspective, making large use of the AdS/CFT correspondence. \nWe first look at the BTZ black hole in which case the black hole horizon and \nthe conical singularity are related to each other. Using the modular transformations of the dual 2D CFT, we first obtain an expression of the holographicentanglement entropy for the Euclidean BTZ black hole, AdS3 vacua and conical singularity and then analyse the behaviour of the leading terms in the expansions of the holographic entanglement entropy for the BTZ black hole and the \nconical singularity. From these calculations, we have extracted the “signatures” through which entanglement entropy differentiates between the horizon and the conical singularity. When we deal with CFT at a finite temperature then it is well known that, entanglement entropy fails as a measure and hence it is replaced by entanglement negativity which is able to separate the thermal/classical \ncorrelations from the quantum correlations thereby capturing “distillable” entanglement. We address the problem of finding a suitable holographic prescription \nto calculate the entanglement negativity for two adjacent intervals when the CFT is at a finite temperature and in turn dual to a black hole in the bulk. We first propose a conjecture for the holographic entanglement negativity for two adjacent intervals in the \nAdS3/CFT2 setup and perform calculations in the \nvarious cases to support this conjecture. We further push forward the validity of this conjecture by calculating the holographic entanglement negativity for two \nadjacent subsystems when we have RN-AdS black holes in the bulk which in \nturn are dual to CFT with a conserved charge.
We consider the entanglement entropy in 2d conformal field theory in a class of excited states produced by the insertion of a heavy local operator. These include both high-energy eigenstates of the Hamiltonian and time-dependent local quenches. We compute the universal contribution from the stress tensor to the single interval Renyi entropies and entanglement entropy, and conjecture that this dominates the answer in theories with a large central charge and a sparse spectrum of low-dimension operators. The resulting entanglement entropies agree precisely with holographic calculations in three-dimensional gravity. High-energy eigenstates are dual to microstates of the BTZ black hole, so the corresponding holographic calculation is a geodesic length in the black hole geometry; agreement between these two answers demonstrates that these individual microstates of holographic CFTs effectively thermalize at the level of the single-interval entanglement entropy. For local quenches, the dual geometry is a highly boosted black hole or conical defect. On the CFT side, the rise in entanglement entropy after a quench is directly related to the monodromy of a Virasoro conformal block.