Can quantum entanglement continue to grow even after the entanglement entropies of subsystems have saturated? We address this question using genuine multi-entropy, which probes multi-partite entanglement structure beyond bipartite entanglement. In a two-sided BTZ black hole, this quantity grows linearly with time after every subsystem entropy of a fixed tripartition has saturated, extending the interval in which entanglement detects Einstein-Rosen bridge growth. The result refines the ER=EPR relation by identifying multi-partite structure invisible to ordinary entanglement entropies. Some spin-chain models and the spatially partitioned Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model exhibit distinct transients, while the late-time plateau values in holography, the SYK model, and Haar-random states share a universal behaviour.
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6 pages, revtex, 5 figures + 5 pages supplemental material
Can quantum entanglement continue to grow even after the entanglement entropies of subsystems have saturated? We address this question using genuine multi-entropy, which probes multi-partite entanglement structure beyond bipartite entanglement. In a two-sided BTZ black hole, this quantity grows linearly with time after every subsystem entropy of a fixed tripartition has saturated, extending the interval in which entanglement detects Einstein-Rosen bridge growth. The result refines the ER=EPR relation by identifying multi-partite structure invisible to ordinary entanglement entropies. Some spin-chain models and the spatially partitioned Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model exhibit distinct transients, while the late-time plateau values in holography, the SYK model, and Haar-random states share a universal behaviour.
Black hole as a multipartite entangler: multi-entropy in AdS3/CFT2
We study multipartite entanglement in typical pure states holographically dual to pure BTZ black holes, using multi-entropy and its ``genuine'' version. In the bulk, these quantities are computed by minimal geodesic networks (so-called Steiner trees). We find that at sufficiently high temperature, the genuine tripartite multi-entropy exhibits a volume-law scaling in sharp contrast to vacuum AdS3, where the genuine contribution is universal and size-independent. Moreover, we find another phase: once one subsystem exceeds half of the total system, the leading genuine tripartite entanglement vanishes and reduces to that for global AdS3. This transition is indeed consistent with recent arguments for distillable EPR pairs in tripartite Haar-random states. Motivated by finite-cutoff holography, we further study the radial cutoff dependence of multi-entropy and show that genuine multi-entropy acquires nontrivial size dependence even for the tripartite case in AdS3. As a byproduct, we also observe an intriguing ``area-law'' contribution to multi-entropy that is relevant to vacuum AdS3.
Multipartite entanglement measures probe how quantum correlations are organized beyond what can be inferred from pairwise entropies. We study how this structure is reshaped by a physical boundary in a holographic BCFT. The end-of-the-world brane opens new relative-homology channels for multipartite entanglement, allowing connected bulk webs to reorganize and factorize at scales that need not coincide with any ordinary Ryu--Takayanagi transition. In static AdS3/BCFT2, this produces a characteristic hierarchy of multipartite phases and a nontrivial dependence of genuine multi-entropy on the boundary. In the thermofield-double state, genuinely connected webs can instead be supported through the Einstein--Rosen bridge, leading to growth, reconnection and saturation scales distinct from the usual Hartman--Maldacena transitions. These results show that multipartite entanglement is sensitive not only to extremal-surface areas but also to how bulk entanglement structures are allowed to join, split and terminate in the presence of a boundary.
If spacetime is built out of quantum bits, does the shape of space depend on how the bits are entangled? The ER=EPR conjecture relates the entanglement entropy of a collection of black holes to the cross sectional area of Einstein-Rosen (ER) bridges (or wormholes) connecting them. We show that the geometrical entropy of classical ER bridges satisfies the subadditivity, triangle, strong subadditivity, and Cadney-Linden-Winter inequalities. These are nontrivial properties of entanglement entropy, so this is evidence for ER=EPR. We further show that the entanglement entropy associated with classical ER bridges has nonpositive tripartite information. This is not a property of entanglement entropy, in general. For example, the entangled four qubit pure state ∣GHZ4⟩=(∣0000⟩+∣1111⟩)/2 has positive tripartite information, so this state cannot be described by a classical ER bridge. Large black holes with massive amounts of entanglement between them can fail to have a classical ER bridge if they are built out of ∣GHZ4⟩ states. States with nonpositive tripartite information are called monogamous. We conclude that classical ER bridges require monogamous EPR correlations.
We uncover a "junction law" for genuine multipartite entanglement, suggesting that in gapped local systems multipartite entanglement is controlled and effectively localized near junctions where subsystem boundaries meet. Using the Rényi-2 genuine multi-entropy GM2(q) as a diagnostic of genuine q-partite entanglement, we establish this behavior in (2+1)-dimensional gapped free-fermion lattices with correlation length ξ. For partitions with a single junction, GM2(q) exhibits a universal scaling crossover in L/ξ, growing for L≪ξ and saturating to a ξ-dependent constant for L≫ξ, up to O(e−L/ξ) corrections. In sharp contrast, for partitions without a junction, GM2(q) is exponentially suppressed in L/ξ and drops below numerical resolution once L≫ξ. We observe the same pattern for q=3 (tripartite) and q=4 (quadripartite) cases, and further corroborate this localization by translating the junction at fixed system size. We also provide a geometric explanation of the junction law in holography. Altogether, these results show that in this gapped free-fermion setting genuine multipartite entanglement is localized within a correlation-length neighborhood of junctions.
We introduce generalization of the recently proposed \textit{Latent Entropy} (L-entropy) \cite{Basak:2024uwc} as a refined measure of genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) in pure states of n-party quantum systems. Generalized L-entropy provides a natural ordering among k-uniform states, maximising for absolutely maximally entangled states (AME), effectively capturing the hierarchical structure of multipartite entanglement. We analyze the behavior of this measure for n-party Haar-random states and demonstrate that, in the large local-dimension limit, the maximal L-entropy saturates its upper bound for odd n, while for even n it approaches the bound asymptotically. Furthermore, we apply this framework to examine multipartite entanglement properties of quantum states in several variants of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, including SYK4, SYK2, mass-deformed SYK, sparse SYK, and N=2 supersymmetric SYK model. The results demonstrate that the generalized L-entropy serves as a sensitive probe of multipartite entanglement, revealing how deformations influence quantum entanglement structure in such strongly interacting systems.
We investigate the multi-partite entanglement structure of an evaporating black hole and its Hawking radiation by dividing the radiation into finer subsystems. We approximate an evaporating black hole and its radiation with a Haar-random state for this purpose. Using the multi-entropy of these configurations, we define a black hole multi-entropy curve, which describes how the multi-entropy changes during the black hole evaporation. This black hole multi-entropy curve is a natural generalization of the Page curve since the multi-entropy reduces to the entanglement entropy for the bi-partite case. The multi-entropy curve keeps increasing in the early time. It reaches the maximum value at the multi-entropy time, which is later than the Page time, and starts to decrease. However, it does not decrease to zero at the end of the black hole evaporation. This non-zero value of the multi-entropy represents the secret entanglement between Hawking particles.