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Vacuum entanglement and black hole entropy of gauge fields

William Donnelly

Published Oct 15, 2012• 2 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Black holes in general relativity carry an entropy whose value is given by the Bekenstein-Hawking formula, but whose statistical origin remains obscure. Such horizons also possess an entanglement entropy, which has a clear statistical meaning but no a priori relation to the dynamics of gravity. For free minimally-coupled scalar and spinor fields, these two quantities are intimately related: the entanglement entropy is the one-loop correction to the black hole entropy due to renormalization of Newton's constant. For gauge fields, the entanglement entropy and the one-loop correction to the black hole entropy differ. This dissertation addresses two issues concerning the entanglement entropy of gauge fields, and its relation black hole entropy. First, for abelian gauge fields Kabat identified a negative divergent contribution to the black hole entropy that is not part of the entanglement entropy, known as a ``contact term''. We show that the contact term can be attributed to an ambiguous expression for the gauge field's contribution to the Wald entropy. Moreover, in two-dimensional de Sitter space, the contact term arises from an incorrect treatment of zero modes and is therefore unphysical. In a manifestly gauge-invariant reduced phase space quantization of two-dimensional gauge theory, the gauge field contribution to the entropy is positive, finite, and equal to the entanglement entropy. This suggests that the contact term in more than two dimensions may also be unphysical. Second, we consider lattice gauge theory and point out that the Hilbert space corresponding to a region of space includes edge states that transform nontrivially under gauge transformations. By decomposing these edge states in irreducible representations of the gauge group, the entanglement entropy of an arbitrary state is shown to be a sum of a bulk entropy and a boundary entropy associated to the edge states. This entropy formula agrees with the two-dimensional results from the reduced phase space quantization. These results are applied to several examples, including the ground state in the strong coupling expansion of Kogut and Susskind, and the entropy of the edge states is found to be the dominant contribution to the entanglement entropy.

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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.

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Black holes in general relativity carry an entropy whose value is given by the Bekenstein-Hawking formula, but whose statistical origin remains obscure. Such horizons also possess an entanglement entropy, which has a clear statistical meaning but no a priori relation to the dynamics of gravity. For free minimally-coupled scalar and spinor fields, these two quantities are intimately related: the entanglement entropy is the one-loop correction to the black hole entropy due to renormalization of Newton's constant. For gauge fields, the entanglement entropy and the one-loop correction to the black hole entropy differ. This dissertation addresses two issues concerning the entanglement entropy of gauge fields, and its relation black hole entropy. First, for abelian gauge fields Kabat identified a negative divergent contribution to the black hole entropy that is not part of the entanglement entropy, known as a ``contact term''. We show that the contact term can be attributed to an ambiguous expression for the gauge field's contribution to the Wald entropy. Moreover, in two-dimensional de Sitter space, the contact term arises from an incorrect treatment of zero modes and is therefore unphysical. In a manifestly gauge-invariant reduced phase space quantization of two-dimensional gauge theory, the gauge field contribution to the entropy is positive, finite, and equal to the entanglement entropy. This suggests that the contact term in more than two dimensions may also be unphysical. Second, we consider lattice gauge theory and point out that the Hilbert space corresponding to a region of space includes edge states that transform nontrivially under gauge transformations. By decomposing these edge states in irreducible representations of the gauge group, the entanglement entropy of an arbitrary state is shown to be a sum of a bulk entropy and a boundary entropy associated to the edge states. This entropy formula agrees with the two-dimensional results from the reduced phase space quantization. These results are applied to several examples, including the ground state in the strong coupling expansion of Kogut and Susskind, and the entropy of the edge states is found to be the dominant contribution to the entanglement entropy.
Using the AdS/CFT correspondence we derive a formula for the entanglement entropy of the anti-de Sitter black hole in two spacetime dimensions. The leading term in the large black hole mass expansion of our formula reproduces exactly the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy SBH, whereas the subleading term behaves as lnSBH. This subleading term has the universal form typical for the entanglement entropy of physical systems described by effective conformal fields theories (e.g. one-dimensional statistical models at the critical point). The well-known form of the entanglement entropy for a two-dimensional conformal field theory is obtained as analytic continuation of our result and is related with the entanglement entropy of a black hole with negative mass.
We study a proposed statistical explanation for the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a black hole in which entropy arises quantum-mechanically as a result of entanglement. Arguments for the identification of black hole entropy with entanglement entropy are reviewed in the framework of quantum field theory, emphasizing the role of renormalization and the need for a physical short-distance cutoff. \n \nOur main novel contribution is a calculation of entanglement entropy in loop quantum gravity. The kinematical Hilbert space and spin network states are introduced, and the entanglement entropy of these states is calculated using methods from quantum information theory. The entanglement entropy is compared with the density of states previously computed for isolated horizons in loop quantum gravity, and the two are found to agree up to a topological term. \n \nWe investigate a conjecture due to Sorkin that the entanglement entropy must be a monotonically increasing function of time under the assumption of causality. For a system described by a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, the conjecture is found to be trivial, and for a system described by an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space a counterexample is provided. \n \nFor quantum states with Euclidean symmetry, the area scaling of the entanglement entropy is shown to be equivalent to the strong additivity condition on the entropy. The strong additivity condition is naturally interpreted in information-theoretic terms as a continuous analog of the Markov property for a classical random variable. We explicitly construct states of a quantum field theory on the one-dimensional real line in which the area law is exactly satisfied.
We consider entanglement entropy between regions of space in lattice gauge theory. The Hilbert space corresponding to a region of space includes ``edge states'' that transform nontrivially under gauge transformations. By decomposing the edge states in irreducible representations of the gauge group, the entropy of an arbitrary state is expressed as the sum of three positive terms: a term associated with the classical Shannon entropy of the distribution of boundary representations, a term that appears only for non-Abelian gauge theories and depends on the dimension of the boundary representations, and a term representing nonlocal correlations. The first two terms are the entropy of the edge states, and depend only on observables measurable at the boundary. These results are applied to several examples of lattice gauge theory states, including the ground state in the strong coupling expansion of Kogut and Susskind. In all these examples we find that the entropy of the edge states is the dominant contribution to the entanglement entropy.
Entanglement entropy has proven to be an extremely useful concept in quantum field theory. Gauge theories are of particular interest, but for these systems the entanglement entropy is not clearly defined because the physical Hilbert space does not factor as a tensor product according to regions of space. Here we review a definition of entanglement entropy that applies to abelian and nonabelian lattice gauge theories. This entanglement entropy is obtained by embedding the physical Hilbert space into a product of Hilbert spaces associated to regions with boundary. The latter Hilbert spaces include degrees of freedom on the entangling surface that transform like surface charges under the gauge symmetry. These degrees of freedom are shown to contribute to the entanglement entropy, and the form of this contribution is determined by the gauge symmetry. We test our definition using the example of two-dimensional Yang-Mills theory, and find that it agrees with the thermal entropy in de Sitter space, and with the results of the Euclidean replica trick. We discuss the possible implications of this result for more complicated gauge theories, including quantum gravity.
The entanglement entropy (EE) of gauge theories in three spacetime dimensions is analyzed using manifestly gauge-invariant variables defined directly in the continuum. Specifically, we focus on the Maxwell, Maxwell-Chern-Simons (MCS), and non-Abelian Yang-Mills theories. Special attention is paid to the analysis of edge modes and their contribution to EE. The contact term is derived without invoking the replica method and its physical origin is traced to the phase space volume measure for the edge modes. The topological contribution to the EE for the MCS case is calculated. For all the Abelian cases, the EE presented in this paper agrees with known results in the literature. The EE for the non-Abelian theory is computed in a gauge-invariant Gaussian approximation, which incorporates the dynamically generated mass gap. A formulation of the contact term for the non-Abelian case is also presented.
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.