A bstract The Ryu-Takayanagi formula relates entanglement entropy in a field theory to the area of extremal surfaces anchored to the boundary of a dual AdS space. It is interesting to ask if there is also an information theoretic interpretation of the areas of non-extremal surfaces that are not necessarily boundary-anchored. In general, the physics outside such surfaces is associated to observers restricted to a time-strip in the dual boundary field theory. When the latter is two-dimensional, it is known that the differential entropy associated to the strip computes the length of the dual bulk curve, and has an interpretation in terms of the information cost in Bell pairs of restoring correlations inaccessible to observers in the strip. A general realization of this formalism in higher dimensions is unknown. We first prove a no-go theorem eliminating candidate expressions for higher dimensional differential entropy based on entropic c-theorems. Then we propose a new formula in terms of an integral of shape derivatives of the entanglement entropy of ball shaped regions. Our proposal stems from the physical requirement that differential entropy must be locally finite and conformally invariant. Demanding cancelation of the well-known UV divergences of entanglement entropy in field theory guides us to our conjecture, which we test for surfaces in AdS 4 . Our results suggest a candidate c-function for field theories in arbitrary dimensions.
A bstract The Ryu-Takayanagi formula relates entanglement entropy in a field theory to the area of extremal surfaces anchored to the boundary of a dual AdS space. It is interesting to ask if there is also an information theoretic interpretation of the areas of non-extremal surfaces that are not necessarily boundary-anchored. In general, the physics outside such surfaces is associated to observers restricted to a time-strip in the dual boundary field theory. When the latter is two-dimensional, it is known that the differential entropy associated to the strip computes the length of the dual bulk curve, and has an interpretation in terms of the information cost in Bell pairs of restoring correlations inaccessible to observers in the strip. A general realization of this formalism in higher dimensions is unknown. We first prove a no-go theorem eliminating candidate expressions for higher dimensional differential entropy based on entropic c-theorems. Then we propose a new formula in terms of an integral of shape derivatives of the entanglement entropy of ball shaped regions. Our proposal stems from the physical requirement that differential entropy must be locally finite and conformally invariant. Demanding cancelation of the well-known UV divergences of entanglement entropy in field theory guides us to our conjecture, which we test for surfaces in AdS 4 . Our results suggest a candidate c-function for field theories in arbitrary dimensions.
Abstract The Ryu-Takayanagi formula relates entanglement entropy in a field theory to the area of extremal surfaces anchored to the boundary of a dual AdS space. It is interesting to ask if there is also an information theoretic interpretation of the areas of non-extremal surfaces that are not necessarily boundary-anchored. In general, the physics outside such surfaces is associated to observers restricted to a time-strip in the dual boundary field theory. When the latter is two-dimensional, it is known that the differential entropy associated to the strip computes the length of the dual bulk curve, and has an interpretation in terms of the information cost in Bell pairs of restoring correlations inaccessible to observers in the strip. A general realization of this formalism in higher dimensions is unknown. We first prove a no-go theorem eliminating candidate expressions for higher dimensional differential entropy based on entropic c-theorems. Then we propose a new formula in terms of an integral of shape derivatives of the entanglement entropy of ball shaped regions. Our proposal stems from the physical requirement that differential entropy must be locally finite and conformally invariant. Demanding cancelation of the well-known UV divergences of entanglement entropy in field theory guides us to our conjecture, which we test for surfaces in AdS4. Our results suggest a candidate c-function for field theories in arbitrary dimensions.
We derive a generalized version of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula for the entanglement entropy in arbitrary diffeomorphism invariant field theories. We use a recent framework which expresses the measurable quantities of a quantum theory as a weighted sum over paths in the theory's phase space. If this framework is applied to a field theory on a spacetime foliated by a hypersurface Σ, the choice of a codimension-2 surface B without boundary contained in Σ specifies a submanifold in the phase space. For diffeomorphism invariant field theories, a functional integral expression for their density matrices was recently given and then used to derive bounds on phase space volumes in the considered submanifold associated to B. These bounds formalize the gravitational entropy bound. Here, we present an implication of this derivation in that we show the obtained functional integral expression for density matrices to be naturally suited for the replica trick. Correspondingly, we prove a functional integral expression for the associated entanglement entropies and derive a practical prescription for their evaluation to leading order and beyond. An important novelty of our approach is the contact to phase space. This allows us both to obtain a prescription for entanglement entropies in arbitrary diffeomorphism invariant field theories not necessarily possessing a holographic dual as well as to use entanglement entropies to study their phase space structure. In the case of the bulk-boundary correspondence, our prescription consistently reproduces and hence provides a natural and independent proof of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula as well as its various generalizations. These include the covariant holographic entanglement entropy proposal, Dong's proposal for higher-derivative gravity as well as the quantum extremal surface prescription.
In 2006, Ryu and Takayanagi (RT) pointed out that (with a suitable cutoff) the entanglement entropy between two complementary regions of an equal-time surface of a d+1-dimensional conformal field theory on the conformal boundary of AdS_{d+2} is, when the AdS radius is appropriately related to the parameters of the CFT, equal to 1/4G times the area of the d-dimensional minimal surface in the AdS bulk which has the junction of those complementary regions as its boundary, where G is the bulk Newton constant. We point out here that the RT-equality implies that, in the quantum theory on the bulk AdS background which is related to the boundary CFT according to Rehren's 1999 algebraic holography theorem, the entanglement entropy between two complementary bulk Rehren wedges is equal to 1/4G times the (suitably cut off) area of their shared ridge. (This follows because of the geometrical fact that, for complementary ball-shaped regions, the RT minimal surface is precisely the shared ridge of the complementary bulk Rehren wedges which correspond, under Rehren's bulk-wedge to boundary double-cone bijection, to the complementary boundary double-cones whose bases are the RT complementary balls.) This is consistent with the Bianchi-Meyers conjecture -- that, in a theory of quantum gravity, the entanglement entropy, S, between the degrees of freedom of a given region with those of its complement is S = A/4G (+ lower order terms) -- but only if the phrase 'degrees of freedom' is replaced by 'matter degrees of freedom'. It also supports related previous arguments of the author -- consistent with the author's 'matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis' -- that the AdS/CFT correspondence is actually only a bijection between just the matter (i.e. non-gravity) sector operators of the bulk and the boundary CFT operators.
A bstract Using recent developments in expressing one-loop partition functions in Euclidean AdS 2 space-times in terms of character integrals, we relate the one-loop effective action for a free field theory in AdS 2 (comprised of a massless scalar field and a massless Majorana fermion field) to the partition function of the de Alfaro-Fubini-Furlan (DFF) conformal quantum mechanics (CQM) models on the two global AdS 2 boundaries. The equal number of bosonic and fermionic degrees in the field theory guarantee that the one-loop calculation is free of all UV divergences except a logarithmic one consistent with the expected entanglement entropy behaviour in a CQM. Via a thermofield double representation, we compute the entanglement entropy between two copies of the CFT 1 (CQM), each living near one of the two boundaries of global AdS 2 , in a state at global time τ → – ∞. This entanglement entropy is expressed in terms of the logarithm of the regularised length of a closed particle trajectory infinitesimally near the rim of the Euclidean AdS 2 disc. We view this relation between boundary quantum entanglement and a bulk geometrical quantity as the AdS 2 / CFT 1 version of the Ryu-Takayanagi conjecture in our setup. The boundary entanglement entropy is equal to 4 times the thermodynamic entropy read off from the regularised one-loop effective action in AdS 2 . Further, we compute the bulk entanglement entropy associated with black hole horizons in Lorentzian AdS 2 and show that it precisely matches the boundary entanglement entropy.
Abstract We study minimum area surfaces associated with a region, R, of an internal space. For example, for a warped product involving an asymptotically AdS space and an internal space K, the region R lies in K and the surface ends on ∂R. We find that the result of Graham and Karch can be avoided in the presence of warping, and such surfaces can sometimes exist for a general region R. When such a warped product geometry arises in the IR from a higher dimensional asymptotic AdS, we argue that the area of the surface can be related to the entropy arising from entanglement of internal degrees of freedom of the boundary theory. We study several examples, including warped or direct products involving AdS2, or higher dimensional AdS spaces, with the internal space, K = Rm, Sm; Dp brane geometries and their near horizon limits; and several geometries with a UV cut-off. We find that such RT surfaces often exist and can be useful probes of the system, revealing information about finite length correlations, thermodynamics and entanglement. We also make some preliminary observations about the role such surfaces can play in bulk reconstruction, and their relation to subalgebras of observables in the boundary theory.
In this Dissertation, different aspects of holographic entanglement entropy are explored. In quantum information theory, entanglement is a useful resource needed to perform quantum operations. Entanglement entropy quantifies this resource and even if computable in quantum field theories, it is quite hard to calculate explicitly. However, in the context of gauge/gravity duality, (holographic) entanglement entropy was proposed by Ryu and Takayanagi (RT) to be captured by the area of a minimal surface in Anti DeSitter (AdS) space, which is extremely simple to compute. We begin by using the holographic dictionary to derive the RT formula. This is done by first considering smooth bulk geometries which are dual to n copies of the boundary geometry glued in a particular way. The action of these geometries computes the Renyi entropies S_n for any integer n. We give a prescription to analytically continue the action to non-integer n and argue that, as n goes to 1,S_1, the entanglement entropy, is given by the area of a minimal surface, reproducing the RT conjecture. That is, we reduced the RT proposal to the equality between bulk and boundary partition functions, a standard entry in the dictionary. We then generalize the previous formalism to account for corrections due to bulk quantum fields (1/N corrections in the boundary). This allows us to derive a new formula: boundary entanglement entropy is given by the area of the minimal surface plus bulk entanglement entropy. This extends RT beyond the planar limit and we present several predictions of the proposal. Our exploration of holographic entanglement entropy continues by considering different states: by comparing the quantum corrected entropy for nearby states we obtain the modular hamiltonian operator in bulk perturbation theory. From this expression of the modular hamiltonian, we derive that relative entropy is bulk relative entropy and that the modular flow is the bulk modular flow.