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Surface growth approach for bulk reconstruction

Yi-Yu Lin, Jia-Rui Sun, Yuan Sun

Published Oct 5, 2020• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We propose a novel and natural surface growth approach to reconstruct the bulk spacetime. The picture is similar to Huygens' principle of wave propagation, in which each subregion of the old entanglement surface becomes a ``wave source'' of the new one, then layer by layer, the newly generated entanglement surfaces can reach bulk region far away from the boundary. We show that this picture can be described reasonably and quantitatively, and thus provides a concrete and intuitive way for the entanglement wedge reconstruction.

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We propose a novel and natural surface growth approach to reconstruct the bulk spacetime. The picture is similar to Huygens' principle of wave propagation, in which each subregion of the old entanglement surface becomes a ``wave source'' of the new one, then layer by layer, the newly generated entanglement surfaces can reach bulk region far away from the boundary. We show that this picture can be described reasonably and quantitatively, and thus provides a concrete and intuitive way for the entanglement wedge reconstruction.
Abstract In this paper, we show using several examples that the bulk geometry of asymptotically AdS spacetimes can be effectively reconstructed using an intuitive and visual method called the surface growth scheme. This new approach for bulk reconstruction was originally proposed in a recent paper, along with its explicit realization using the one-shot entanglement distillation tensor network and the surface/state correspondence. In this paper, we directly analyze the growth of the bulk minimal surfaces to implement this scheme. Our study provides further support for the surface growth approach in entanglement wedge reconstruction.
Abstract In this study, we extend the surface growth approach for bulk reconstruction into the AdS spacetime with a boundary in the AdS/BCFT correspondence. We show that the geometry in the entanglement wedge with a boundary can be constructed from the direct growth of bulk extremal surfaces layer by layer. Furthermore, we observe that the surface growth configuration in BCFT can be connected with the defect multi scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) tensor network. Additionally, we investigate the entanglement of purification within the surface growth process, which not only reveals more refined structure of entanglement entropy in the entanglement wedge but also suggests a selection rule for surface growth in the bulk reconstruction.
In this paper, we extend the surface growth scheme in AdS spacetime with a boundary in the AdS/BCFT correspondence. We show that the entanglement wedge with a boundary can be constructed from the direct growth of bulk extremal surfaces layer by layer. In addition, we find that the surface growth configuration in BCFT can be connected with the defect multi scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) tensor network. Furthermore, we also investigate the entanglement of purification within the surface growth process, which reveals more refined structure of entanglement entropy and indicates a selection rule for surface growth in the bulk reconstruction.
Bulk reconstruction is a central problem in AdS/CFT, and entanglement wedge reconstruction is its subregion version. We argue that this subregion statement should be separated from the stronger holographic quantum error correction interpretation, in which one region-independent logical bulk operator has code-preserving representatives in several boundary regions. A simple locality argument shows that such a common reconstruction must commute with the code-preserving local algebras in the complementary regions. This is the mechanism realized in HaPPY-type codes: the erased regions are blind to a protected logical algebra. An ordinary finite NNN holographic CFT does not have such a protected invisible sector for supergravity fields. Its low-energy local observables, in particular, suitably smeared stress tensors, detect the physical support and gravitational dressing of ordinary bulk operators, up to possible center or superselection data. Thus, there is no such holographic quantum error correction and the N=∞N=\inftyN=∞ agreement of global and subregion HKLL formulae is a free-theory statement. What remains is entanglement wedge reconstruction without holographic quantum error correction, or subregion complementarity: each boundary region has its own code-preserving low-energy algebra and its own region-adapted bulk interpretation, rather than a shared logical operator.
We show that the bulk region reconstructable from a given boundary subregion---which we term the reconstruction wedge---can be much smaller than the entanglement wedge even when backreaction is small. We find arbitrarily large separations between the reconstruction and entanglement wedges in near-vacuum states for regions close to an entanglement phase transition, and for more general regions in states with large energy (but very low energy density). Our examples also illustrate situations for which the quantum extremal surface is macroscopically different from the Ryu-Takayanagi surface.
In the context of quantum theories of spacetime, one overarching question is how quantum information in the bulk spacetime is encoded holographically in boundary degrees of freedom.It is particularly interesting to understand the correspondence between bulk subregions and boundary subregions in order to address the emergence of locality in the bulk quantum spacetime.For the AdS/CFT correspondence, it is known that this bulk information is encoded redundantly on the boundary in the form of an error-correcting code.Having access only to a subregion of the boundary is as if part of the holographic code has been damaged by noise and rendered inaccessible.In quantum-information science, the problem of recovering information from a damaged code is addressed by the theory of universal recovery channels.We apply and extend this theory to address the problem of relating bulk and boundary subregions in AdS/CFT, focusing on a conjecture known as entanglement wedge reconstruction.Existing work relies on the exact equivalence between bulk and boundary relative entropies, but these are only approximately equal in bulk effective field theory, and in similar situations it is known that predictions from exact entropic equalities can be qualitatively incorrect.We show that the framework of universal recovery channels provides a robust demonstration of the entanglement wedge reconstruction conjecture as well as new physical insights.Most notably, we find that a bulk operator acting in a given boundary region's entanglement wedge can be expressed as the response of the boundary region's modular Hamiltonian to a perturbation of the bulk state in the direction of the bulk operator.This formula can be interpreted as a noncommutative version of Bayes's rule that attempts to undo the noise induced by restricting to only a portion of the boundary.To reach these conclusions, we extend the theory of universal recovery channels to finite-dimensional operator algebras and demonstrate that recovery channels approximately preserve the multiplicative structure of the operator algebra.