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Local quenches, bulk entanglement entropy and a unitary Page curve

César A. Agón

Published Jul 4, 2023• 20 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum corrections to the entanglement entropy of matter fields interacting with dynamical gravity have proven to be very important in the study of the black hole information problem. We consider a one-particle excited state of a massive scalar field infalling in a pure AdS3geometry and compute these corrections for bulk subregions anchored on the AdS boundary. In the dual CFT2, the state is given by the insertion of a local primary operator and its evolution thereafter. We calculate the area and bulk entanglement entropy corrections at order $$ \mathcal{O}\left({N}^0\right), $$ ON0, both in AdS and its CFT dual. The two calculations match, thus providing a non-trivial check of the FLM formula in a dynamical setting. Further, we observe that the bulk entanglement entropy follows a Page curve. We explain the precise sense in which our setup can be interpreted as a simple model of black hole evaporation and comment on the implications for the information problem.

DOI
10.1007/jhep08%282020%29152

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Quantum corrections to the entanglement entropy of matter fields interacting with dynamical gravity have proven to be very important in the study of the black hole information problem. We consider a one-particle excited state of a massive scalar field infalling in a pure AdS3geometry and compute these corrections for bulk subregions anchored on the AdS boundary. In the dual CFT2, the state is given by the insertion of a local primary operator and its evolution thereafter. We calculate the area and bulk entanglement entropy corrections at order O(N0),\mathcal{O}\left({N}^0\right),O(N0), ON0, both in AdS and its CFT dual. The two calculations match, thus providing a non-trivial check of the FLM formula in a dynamical setting. Further, we observe that the bulk entanglement entropy follows a Page curve. We explain the precise sense in which our setup can be interpreted as a simple model of black hole evaporation and comment on the implications for the information problem.
Abstract Quantum corrections to the entanglement entropy of matter fields interacting with dynamical gravity have proven to be very important in the study of the black hole information problem. We consider a one-particle excited state of a massive scalar field infalling in a pure AdS3 geometry and compute these corrections for bulk subregions anchored on the AdS boundary. In the dual CFT2, the state is given by the insertion of a local primary operator and its evolution thereafter. We calculate the area and bulk entanglement entropy corrections at order O(N0), \mathcal{O}\left({N}^0\right), O(N0), O N 0 , both in AdS and its CFT dual. The two calculations match, thus providing a non-trivial check of the FLM formula in a dynamical setting. Further, we observe that the bulk entanglement entropy follows a Page curve. We explain the precise sense in which our setup can be interpreted as a simple model of black hole evaporation and comment on the implications for the information problem.
A bstract We consider linear superpositions of single particle excitations in a scalar field theory on AdS 3 and evaluate their contribution to the bulk entanglement entropy across the Ryu-Takayanagi surface. We compare the entanglement entropy of these excitations obtained using the Faulkner-Lewkowycz-Maldacena formula to the entanglement entropy of linear superposition of global descendants of a conformal primary in a large c CFT obtained using the replica trick. We show that the closed form expressions for the entanglement entropy in the small interval expansion both in gravity and the CFT precisely agree. The agreement serves as a non-trivial check of the FLM formula for the quantum corrections to holographic entanglement entropy as well as the methods developed in the CFT to evaluate entanglement entropy of descendants. Our checks includes an example in which the state is time dependent and spatially in-homogenous as well another example involving a coherent state with a Bañados geometry as its holographic dual.
We compute the bulk entanglement entropy across the Ryu-Takayanagi surface for a one-particle state in a scalar field theory in AdS _3 3 . We work directly within the bulk Hilbert space and include the spatial spread of the scalar wavefunction. We give closed form expressions in the limit of small interval sizes and compare the result to a CFT computation of entanglement entropy in an excited primary state at large c c . Including the contribution from the backreacted minimal area, we find agreement between the CFT result and the FLM and JLMS formulas for quantum corrections to holographic entanglement entropy. This provides a non-trivial check in a state where the answer is not dictated by symmetry. Along the way, we provide closed-form expressions for the scalar field Bogoliubov coefficients that relate the global and Rindler slicings of AdS _3 3 .
A bstract We consider single-particle excitations of the massive Chern-Simons field of mass M in AdS 3 and evaluate their contribution at the first sub-leading order in G N to the entanglement entropy across the Ryu-Takayanagi surface. Quantizing the Chern-Simons field in AdS 3 , we evaluate the corrections to the holographic entanglement entropy using the Faulkner-Lewkowycz-Maldacena formula. The massive Chern-Simons field also obeys the equations of motion of a massive vector in AdS 3 . The lowest-energy single-particle excitation of this field is dual to the primary operator of conformal dimension M + 1 with spin one in the dual CFT; all other single-particle excitations are dual to its global descendants. We compare the entanglement entropy result from the FLM formula to the single-interval entanglement entropy in large-charge holographic CFT obtained using the replica trick for the primary and its tower of holomorphic descendants. The two results agree precisely in the leading and sub-leading terms of the short interval expansion. We evaluate the contribution of the edge mode to the vacuum-subtracted entanglement and show that it vanishes, which is crucial for the FLM formula to agree with the CFT result. On taking the massless limit, the result coincides with the contribution of a U (1) current to the single interval entanglement entropy. This is surprising since an earlier calculation in the literature reproduced the CFT result entirely from the edge U (1) degrees of freedom on the RT surface.
We study the structure and dynamics of entanglement in CFTs and black holes. We use a local entanglement measure, the entanglement contour, which is a spatial density function for von Neumann entropy with some additional properties. The entanglement contour can be calculated in many 1+1d condensed matter systems and simple models of black hole evaporation. We calculate the entanglement contour of a state excited by a splitting quench, and find universal results for the entanglement contours of low energy non-equilibrium states in 2d CFTs. We also calculate the contour of a non-gravitational bath coupled to an extremal AdS _2 2 black hole, and find that the contour only has finite support within the bath, due to an island phase transition. The particular entanglement contour proposal we use quantifies how well the bath’s state can be reconstructed from its marginals, through its connection to conditional mutual information, and the vanishing contour is a reflection of the protection of bulk island regions against erasures of the boundary state.
A bstract The corrections to holographic entanglement entropy from bulk quantum fields in a classical gravitational background are now well understood. They lead, in particular, to unitary Page curves for evaporating black holes. However, the correct treatment of quantum fluctuations of the metric, including graviton excitations, is a longstanding problem. We provide a gauge-invariant prescription for the generalized entropy of gravitons in anti-de Sitter space in terms of areas and bulk entanglement entropy, generalizing the quantum extremal surface prescription to accommodate fluctuations in the semiclassical spacetime geometry. This task requires a careful treatment of the area operator on the graviton Hilbert space and the definition of a “quantum extremal gauge” in which the extremal surface is unperturbed. It also requires us to determine the correct vacuum modular Hamiltonian for the graviton field, which we fix by requiring that it doesn’t contain a boundary term in extremal gauge. We check our prescription with an explicit computation of the vacuum-subtracted generalized entropy of states containing a graviton in an AdS-Rindler background. Our results exactly match vacuum-subtracted von Neumann entropies for stress-tensor excited states in holographic conformal field theory with d > 2 dimensions. We also use covariant phase space techniques to give a partial proof of our prescription when the entanglement wedge for the background spacetime has a bifurcate Killing horizon. Along the way, we identify a class of perturbative graviton states that have parametrically larger generalized entropy, in the small G N expansion, than any low-energy excitations of an ordinary quantum field.