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arXiv:2309.05220

Revisiting 3D Flat Holography: Causality Structure and Modular flow

Yuefeng Liu

Published Sep 11, 2023• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Flat space holography is an open and hard problem existing several different approaches, which may finally turn out to be consistent with each other, in the literature to tackle it. Focusing on how bulk emergent spacetime is encoded in quantum information of null boundaries, we choose a specific toy model called the flat$_3$/BMSFT model, which conjectures the duality between boundary BMS$_3$ invariant field theory and bulk quantum gravity in 3D asymptotic flat spacetimes (AFS), to explore. Aiming to find an entanglement wedge like quantity for single interval and a connected entanglement wedge for multi-intervals in flat$_3$/BMSFT model, we explore the bulk causality structures related to the holographic swing surface proposal through both boundary and bulk local modular flow, make a corresponding decomposition of the global Minkowski spacetime and look at the entanglement phase transition. As a byproduct, we solve the problem about the existence of partial entanglement entropy (PEE) correspondence in this model which is a bit nontrivial due to the unusual behavior of boundary modular flow in BMS$_3$ field theory. Among the literature considering quantum information aspects of flat$_3$/BMSFT model, there are several substantial, unusual but overlooked phenomena which need to be emphasized and revisited to gain more deserved attention. Thus another motivation of this paper is to find where these unusual phenomena come from, and physically show in a manifest way what they may imply. After reading we hope readers can feel sincerely what we present about the above mentioned second aim is more valuable than the mathematical results in the present paper.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2309.05220

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We explore the fine structure of the holographic entanglement entropy proposal (the Ryu-Takayanagi formula) in AdS3_33​/CFT2_{2}2​. With the guidance from the boundary and bulk modular flows we find a natural slicing of the entanglement wedge with the modular planes, which are co-dimension one bulk surfaces tangent to the modular flow everywhere. This gives an one-to-one correspondence between the points on the boundary interval A\mathcal{A}A and the points on the Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) surface EA\mathcal{E}_{\mathcal{A}}EA​. In the same sense an arbitrary subinterval A2\mathcal{A}_2A2​ of A\mathcal{A}A will correspond to a subinterval E2\mathcal{E}_2E2​ of EA\mathcal{E}_{\mathcal{A}}EA​. We propose that the length of E2\mathcal{E}_2E2​ captures the contribution from A2\mathcal{A}_2A2​ to the entanglement entropy SAS_{\mathcal{A}}SA​, and compare it with the mutual information between A2\mathcal{A}_2A2​ and the complement Ac\mathcal{A}^cAc.
A central insight of holography is that spacetime geometry emerges from the quantum entanglement of a boundary theory. This work proposes and validates a precise, local manifestation of this principle: in a 1+1D boundary conformal field theory (CFT) dual to an asymptotically bulk, the Ricci scalar curvature is proportional to the negative second derivative of the entanglement entropy density. This hypothesis, motivated by the Ryu-Takayanagi formula and the geodesic deviation equation, posits that local fluctuations in boundary entanglement directly encode local bulk curvature. The relation is tested numerically using a tensor network toy model inspired by the Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (MERA). Localized suppressions of boundary entanglement, analogous to removing disentanglers in MERA, are shown to induce localized positive curvature spikes in the emergent bulk geometry. The results provide direct computational evidence for the entanglement-curvature correspondence, reinforcing the paradigm that spacetime geometry is built from quantum entanglement.