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Entanglement entropy from the holographic stress tensor

Arpan Bhattacharyya, Aninda Sinha

Published Jan 1, 2013• 10 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We consider entanglement entropy in the context of gauge/gravity duality for conformal field theories in even dimensions. The holographic prescription due to Ryu and Takayanagi (RT) leads to an equation describing how the entangling surface extends into the bulk geometry. We show that setting to zero, the timetime component of the Brown-York stress tensor evaluated on the co-dimension 1 entangling surface, leads to the same equation. By considering a spherical entangling surface as an example, we observe that the Euclidean actionmethods in AdS/CFT will lead to the RT area functional arising as a counterterm needed to regularize the stress tensor. We present arguments leading to a justification for the minimal area prescription.

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We consider entanglement entropy in the context of gauge/gravity duality for conformal field theories in even dimensions. The holographic prescription due to Ryu and Takayanagi (RT) leads to an equation describing how the entangling surface extends into the bulk geometry. We show that setting to zero, the timetime component of the Brown-York stress tensor evaluated on the co-dimension 1 entangling surface, leads to the same equation. By considering a spherical entangling surface as an example, we observe that the Euclidean actionmethods in AdS/CFT will lead to the RT area functional arising as a counterterm needed to regularize the stress tensor. We present arguments leading to a justification for the minimal area prescription.
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.
It was proposed by Ryu and Takayanagi that the entanglement entropy in conformal field theory (CFT) is related through the AdS/CFT correspondence to the area of a minimal surface in the bulk. We apply this holographic geometrical method of calculating the entanglement entropy to study the vacuum case of a CFT which is holographically dual to empty anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. We present all possible minimal surfaces spanned on one or two spherical boundaries at AdS infinity. We give exact analytical expressions for the regularized areas of these surfaces and identify finite renormalized quantities. In the case of two disjoint boundaries the existence of two different phases of the entanglement entropy is confirmed. A trivial phase corresponds to two disconnected minimal surfaces, while the other one corresponds to a tube connecting the spherical boundaries. A transition between these phases is reminiscent of the finite temperature deconfinement transition in the CFT on the boundary. The exact analytical results are thus consistent with previous numerical and approximate computations. We also briefly discuss the character of a spacetime extension of the minimal surface spanned on two uniformly accelerated boundaries.
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.
Holographic entanglement entropy of two disjoint intervals in AdS3_33​/CFT2_22​
The Ryu-Takayanagi conjecture predicts a holographic dual of the entanglement entropy of a CFT. It proposes that the entanglement entropy is given by the area of the minimal surface in the dual spacetime. In the semi-classical limit, this conjecture is supported by the saddle point approximation. If there are multiple classical solutions, it is assumed that only the minimal action contributes to the entanglement entropy. However, we will point out that these saddles equally contribute to the entanglement entropy in some cases. Therefore, the derivation of the conjecture is incomplete if there are multiple extremal surfaces that extend from a sub-system on the AdS boundary. We will consider two disjoint intervals in CFT1+1_{1+1}1+1​ as the simplest but non-trivial example, and propose another candidate for a holographic dual of the entanglement entropy of this system, which is the sum of all the signed areas of extremal surfaces in the dual spacetime. After that, we will derive it from the CFT calculations and propose the corresponding gravity side action.
The Ryu-Takayanagi formula relates the entanglement entropy in a conformal field theory to the area of a minimal surface in its holographic dual. We show that this relation can be inverted for any state in the conformal field theory to compute the bulk stress-energy tensor near the boundary of the bulk spacetime, reconstructing the local data in the bulk from the entanglement on the boundary. We also show that positivity, monotonicity, and convexity of the relative entropy for small spherical domains between the reduced density matrices of any state and of the ground state of the conformal field theory are guaranteed by positivity conditions on the bulk matter energy density. As positivity and monotonicity of the relative entropy are general properties of quantum systems, this can be interpreted as a derivation of bulk energy conditions in any holographic system for which the Ryu-Takayanagi prescription applies. We discuss an information theoretical interpretation of the convexity in terms of the Fisher metric.
We propose a renormalization scheme for entanglement entropy of three-dimensional CFTs with a four-dimensional asymptotically AdS gravity dual in the context of the gauge/gravity correspondence. The procedure consists in adding the Chern form as a boundary term to the area functional of the Ryu-Takayanagi minimal surface. We provide an explicit prescription for the renormalized entanglement entropy, which is derived via the replica trick. This is achieved by considering a Euclidean gravitational action renormalized by the addition of the Chern form at the spacetime boundary, evaluated in the conically-singular replica manifold. We show that the addition of this boundary term cancels the divergent part of the entanglement entropy, recovering the results obtained by Taylor and Woodhead. We comment on how this prescription for renormalizing the entanglement entropy is in line with the general program of topological renormalization in asymptotically AdS gravity.