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arXiv:2412.15070

Islands, Double Holography, and the Entanglement Membrane

Hanzhi Jiang, Mike Blake, Anthony P. Thompson

Published Dec 19, 2024• 0 citations
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Abstract

The quantum extremal island rule allows us to compute the Page curves of Hawking radiation in semi-classical gravity. In this work, we study the connection between these calculations and the thermalisation of chaotic quantum many-body systems, using a coarse-grained description of entanglement dynamics known as the entanglement membrane. Starting from a double-holographic model of eternal two-sided asymptotically AdS$_d$ ($d>2$) black hole each coupled to a flat $d$-dimensional bath, we show that the entanglement dynamics in the late-time, large-subregion limit is described by entanglement membrane, thereby establishing a quantitative equivalence between a semi-classical gravity and a chaotic quantum many-body system calculation of the Page curve.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2412.15070

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The quantum extremal island rule allows us to compute the Page curves of Hawking radiation in semi-classical gravity. In this work, we study the connection between these calculations and the thermalisation of chaotic quantum many-body systems, using a coarse-grained description of entanglement dynamics known as the entanglement membrane. Starting from a double-holographic model of eternal two-sided asymptotically AdSd_dd​ (d>2d>2d>2) black hole each coupled to a flat ddd-dimensional bath, we show that the entanglement dynamics in the late-time, large-subregion limit is described by entanglement membrane, thereby establishing a quantitative equivalence between a semi-classical gravity and a chaotic quantum many-body system calculation of the Page curve.
Abstract We study entanglement dynamics in toy models of black hole information built out of chaotic many-body quantum systems, by utilising a coarse-grained description of entanglement dynamics in such systems known as the ‘entanglement membrane’. We show that in these models the Page curve associated to the entropy of Hawking radiation arises from a transition in the entanglement membrane around the Page time, in an analogous manner to the change in quantum extremal surfaces that leads to the Page curve in semi-classical gravity. We also use the entanglement membrane prescription to study the Hayden-Preskill protocol, and demonstrate how information initially encoded in the black hole is rapidly transferred to the radiation around the Page time. Our results relate recent developments in black hole information to generic features of entanglement dynamics in chaotic many-body quantum systems.
A large part of the discussion on entanglement islands has explored the specific setup of 2d2d2d JT gravity with a flat heatbath coupled to a 2d2d2d CFT. In this paper, we consider a more general setup and treatment of islands in a d−d-d−dimensional AdS black hole background. The quantum fields modeling the Hawking radiation have a scale and are consistently inherited from a conformal parent theory; their symmetries are thus compatible with those of curved backgrounds. We demonstrate explicitly that the existence of islands is sensitive to the choice of CFT used to model the Hawking radiation. We compute the renormalised entanglement entropy of conformal fields on a negatively curved background in ddd dimensions at zero temperature as well as the thermal regulated entropy of an entangling region near the UV boundary. Using the latter quantity as the entropy of the Hawking radiation, we find that islands never emerge for d>2d>2d>2.
We study thermodynamic properties and the entanglement island of a black hole in asymptotically safe quantum gravity, analyzing key thermodynamic quantities such as the Hawking temperature, heat capacity, and entropy, as well as the mass-horizon radius relation. Unlike Schwarzschild black holes, the temperature decreases with mass near the evaporation endpoint, signaling a phase transition and possible stable remnant. The entanglement entropy of Hawking radiation is obtained both with and without island contributions. Without islands, the radiation entropy grows linearly indefinitely, leading to the information paradox. By including island contributions and extremizing the generalized entropy functional, we resolve this paradox. At late times, the radiation entropy saturates at the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, confirming unitary evolution. From this, we derive the Page time and scrambling time by equating early- and late-time entanglement entropies. The result of this study establishes the finiteness of the radiation entropy and consistency with quantum mechanics.
The Island Formula for Quantum Extremal Surfaces of large AdS black holes, which are made to evaporate by coupling the CFT of the AdS/CFT correspondence to an external system, demonstrates that the space time picture can reproduce the quantum mechanically required Page curve of the CFT/bath system if a region in the interior of the black hole has become entangled with the external radiation by the Page time. In an effective quantum field theory (EFT) description in ``nice slice" coordinates, this appears to imply paradoxical entanglement between degrees of freedom that have been causally disconnected since long before the Page time. We will give two arguments that all of the quantum information in the island is in fact concentrated in a tiny space-like portion of the island very close to the black hole horizon at the Page time. The first applies the covariant entropy bound\cite{fsb} (CEB) to the causal diamonds of geodesics originating on the space-like region that becomes the island, but on a time slice just before the Page time. All points on the island except those in a stretched horizon region very close to the horizon have entropy bounds that are tiny fractions of the black hole entropy. The second argument uses standard quantum statistical mechanics combined with the tensor network renormalization group regularization of CFT to argue that the wave function of a typical pure state in the microcanonical evaporating black hole always has most of its probability concentrated in a small range of wavelengths corresponding to a small range of radii in the dual tensor network/AdS slice.
This article is a write-up of pedagogical lectures delivered at the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics online winter school held in January 2021, and also as part of the Quantum Information, Quantum Field Theory and Gravity program held at ICTS, Bengaluru, in August 2024. The topics covered include a brief derivation of Hawking radiation from the perspective of correlation functions, a description of entropy paradoxes in the eternal black hole, and details of the associated entanglement island computations in two-dimensional models.
We study how mixed-state correlations reorganize across island transitions in Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity coupled to a non-gravitating bath. Using the partial-dimensional-reduction realization of double holography, we compute reflected entropy for adjacent and disjoint radiation regions in the vacuum and in the thermofield-double state of an eternal black hole. Reflected entropy probes the internal partition of the entanglement wedge and therefore resolves structure that is invisible to the ordinary Page curve: its dominant saddle can change even when the entropy saddle of the union remains fixed, and it vanishes at leading order when the entanglement wedge disconnects. We show that the lower-dimensional reflected-island description agrees, to leading order in the dynamical brane fluctuation, with the higher-dimensional defect-extremal-surface picture. The finite-angle comparison further suggests a projection-covariant identification of island and brane endpoints at linear order. The resulting Page-like curves and Markov gaps provide a geometric probe of the reorganization of the purification and of non-Markovian, multipartite correlation structure during island transitions.