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Local measures of entanglement structure and dynamics in CFTs and black holes

Andrew Rolph

Published Jul 23, 2021• 5 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

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 additional properties. 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$_2$ 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.

Related papers

Local measures of entanglement in black holes and CFTs

Andrew Rolph

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.

arXiv:2107.11385•SciPost Physics•Mar 1, 2022•27 citations

Shaping contours of entanglement islands in BCFT

Dmitry Sergeevich Ageev

Abstract In this paper, we study the fine structure of entanglement in holographic two-dimensional boundary conformal field theories (BCFT) in terms of the spatially resolved quasilocal extension of entanglement entropy — entanglement contour. We find that the boundary induces discontinuities in the contour revealing hidden localization-delocalization patterns of the entanglement degrees of freedom. Moreover, we observe the formation of “islands” where the entanglement contour vanishes identically implying that these regions do not contribute to the entanglement at all. We argue that these phenomena are the manifestation of the entanglement islands recently discussed in the literature. We apply the entanglement contour proposal to the recently discussed BCFT black hole models reproducing the Page curve — moving mirror model and the pair of BCFT in the thermofield double state. From the viewpoint of entanglement contour, the Page curve also carries the imprint of strong delocalization caused by dynamical entanglement islands.

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Illuminating entanglement shadows of BTZ black holes by a generalized entanglement measure

Marius Gerbershagen

Abstract We define a generalized entanglement measure in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Compared to the ordinary entanglement entropy for a spatial subregion dual to the area of the Ryu-Takayanagi surface, we take into account both entanglement between spatial degrees of freedom as well as between different fields of the boundary theory. Moreover, we resolve the contribution to the entanglement entropy of strings with different winding numbers in the bulk geometry. We then calculate this generalized entanglement measure in a thermal state dual to the BTZ black hole in the setting of the D1/D5 system at and close to the orbifold point. We find that the entanglement entropy defined in this way is dual to the length of a geodesic with non-zero winding number. Such geodesics probe the entire bulk geometry, including the entanglement shadow up to the horizon in the one-sided black hole as well as the wormhole growth in the case of a two-sided black hole for an arbitrarily long time. Therefore, we propose that the entanglement structure of the boundary state is enough to reconstruct asymptotically AdS3 geometries up to extremal surface barriers.

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Entanglement contour from subset entanglement entropies

Qiang Wen

Entanglement contour characterizes the spatial structure of entanglement and quantifies the contribution from the degrees of freedom in any subset of the region $\mathcal{A}$ to the total entanglement entropy $S_{\mathcal{A}}$. Recently in \cite{Wen:2018whg} the author gave a simple proposal for the entanglement contour (or partial entanglement entropy) in two-dimensional theories, which involves the entanglement entropies of all the subsets inside $\mathcal{A}$. In this paper we explicitly study this proposal and show it satisfies many rational requirements for entanglement contour. Together with the holographic picture constructed with the modular planes \cite{Wen:2018whg}, we propose the correspondence between bulk geodesic chords and boundary partial entanglement entropies, which can be considered as a finer version of the Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) formula. As an example we calculate the fine correspondence between the points on $\mathcal{A}$ and the points on the RT surface $\mathcal{E}_{\mathcal{A}}$ for the BTZ black hole. We also give a strategy to extract the local modular flow from our proposal.

•Feb 19, 2019•3 citations

The hyperfine structure of quantum entanglement

Liang-Hong Mo, Yao Zhou, Jia-Rui Sun +1 more

Abstract Quantum entanglement, crucial for understanding quantum many-body systems and quantum gravity, is commonly assessed through various measures such as von Neumann entropy, mutual information, and entanglement contour, each with its inherent limitations. In this work, we introduce the hyperfine structure of entanglement, which decomposes entanglement contours known as the fine structure into particle-number cumulants. This measure exhibits a set of universal properties with its significance in quantum information science. We apply it across diverse contexts: in Fermi gases, establishing connections to mutual information and interacting conformal field theory; in AdS 3 /CFT 2 holographic duality, unveiling finer subregion–subregion duality; and in Chern insulators, distinguishing between different quantum phases, especially topological gapped state and trivial gapped state. Our findings suggest experimental accessibility, offering fresh insights into quantum entanglement across physical systems.

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Holographic entanglement entropy from 2d CFT: heavy states and local quenches

Curtis T. Asplund, Alice Bernamonti, Federico Galli +1 more

We consider the entanglement entropy in 2d conformal field theory in a class of excited states produced by the insertion of a heavy local operator. These include both high-energy eigenstates of the Hamiltonian and time-dependent local quenches. We compute the universal contribution from the stress tensor to the single interval Renyi entropies and entanglement entropy, and conjecture that this dominates the answer in theories with a large central charge and a sparse spectrum of low-dimension operators. The resulting entanglement entropies agree precisely with holographic calculations in three-dimensional gravity. High-energy eigenstates are dual to microstates of the BTZ black hole, so the corresponding holographic calculation is a geodesic length in the black hole geometry; agreement between these two answers demonstrates that these individual microstates of holographic CFTs effectively thermalize at the level of the single-interval entanglement entropy. For local quenches, the dual geometry is a highly boosted black hole or conical defect. On the CFT side, the rise in entanglement entropy after a quench is directly related to the monodromy of a Virasoro conformal block.

arXiv:1410.1392•Journal of High Energy Physics•Feb 1, 2015•279 citations
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 additional properties. 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 AdS2_22​ 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.
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.
Abstract In this paper, we study the fine structure of entanglement in holographic two-dimensional boundary conformal field theories (BCFT) in terms of the spatially resolved quasilocal extension of entanglement entropy — entanglement contour. We find that the boundary induces discontinuities in the contour revealing hidden localization-delocalization patterns of the entanglement degrees of freedom. Moreover, we observe the formation of “islands” where the entanglement contour vanishes identically implying that these regions do not contribute to the entanglement at all. We argue that these phenomena are the manifestation of the entanglement islands recently discussed in the literature. We apply the entanglement contour proposal to the recently discussed BCFT black hole models reproducing the Page curve — moving mirror model and the pair of BCFT in the thermofield double state. From the viewpoint of entanglement contour, the Page curve also carries the imprint of strong delocalization caused by dynamical entanglement islands.
Abstract We define a generalized entanglement measure in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Compared to the ordinary entanglement entropy for a spatial subregion dual to the area of the Ryu-Takayanagi surface, we take into account both entanglement between spatial degrees of freedom as well as between different fields of the boundary theory. Moreover, we resolve the contribution to the entanglement entropy of strings with different winding numbers in the bulk geometry. We then calculate this generalized entanglement measure in a thermal state dual to the BTZ black hole in the setting of the D1/D5 system at and close to the orbifold point. We find that the entanglement entropy defined in this way is dual to the length of a geodesic with non-zero winding number. Such geodesics probe the entire bulk geometry, including the entanglement shadow up to the horizon in the one-sided black hole as well as the wormhole growth in the case of a two-sided black hole for an arbitrarily long time. Therefore, we propose that the entanglement structure of the boundary state is enough to reconstruct asymptotically AdS3 geometries up to extremal surface barriers.
Entanglement contour characterizes the spatial structure of entanglement and quantifies the contribution from the degrees of freedom in any subset of the region A\mathcal{A}A to the total entanglement entropy SAS_{\mathcal{A}}SA​. Recently in \cite{Wen:2018whg} the author gave a simple proposal for the entanglement contour (or partial entanglement entropy) in two-dimensional theories, which involves the entanglement entropies of all the subsets inside A\mathcal{A}A. In this paper we explicitly study this proposal and show it satisfies many rational requirements for entanglement contour. Together with the holographic picture constructed with the modular planes \cite{Wen:2018whg}, we propose the correspondence between bulk geodesic chords and boundary partial entanglement entropies, which can be considered as a finer version of the Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) formula. As an example we calculate the fine correspondence between the points on A\mathcal{A}A and the points on the RT surface EA\mathcal{E}_{\mathcal{A}}EA​ for the BTZ black hole. We also give a strategy to extract the local modular flow from our proposal.
Abstract Quantum entanglement, crucial for understanding quantum many-body systems and quantum gravity, is commonly assessed through various measures such as von Neumann entropy, mutual information, and entanglement contour, each with its inherent limitations. In this work, we introduce the hyperfine structure of entanglement, which decomposes entanglement contours known as the fine structure into particle-number cumulants. This measure exhibits a set of universal properties with its significance in quantum information science. We apply it across diverse contexts: in Fermi gases, establishing connections to mutual information and interacting conformal field theory; in AdS 3 /CFT 2 holographic duality, unveiling finer subregion–subregion duality; and in Chern insulators, distinguishing between different quantum phases, especially topological gapped state and trivial gapped state. Our findings suggest experimental accessibility, offering fresh insights into quantum entanglement across physical systems.
We consider the entanglement entropy in 2d conformal field theory in a class of excited states produced by the insertion of a heavy local operator. These include both high-energy eigenstates of the Hamiltonian and time-dependent local quenches. We compute the universal contribution from the stress tensor to the single interval Renyi entropies and entanglement entropy, and conjecture that this dominates the answer in theories with a large central charge and a sparse spectrum of low-dimension operators. The resulting entanglement entropies agree precisely with holographic calculations in three-dimensional gravity. High-energy eigenstates are dual to microstates of the BTZ black hole, so the corresponding holographic calculation is a geodesic length in the black hole geometry; agreement between these two answers demonstrates that these individual microstates of holographic CFTs effectively thermalize at the level of the single-interval entanglement entropy. For local quenches, the dual geometry is a highly boosted black hole or conical defect. On the CFT side, the rise in entanglement entropy after a quench is directly related to the monodromy of a Virasoro conformal block.