Topological Entanglement Entropy of Black Hole Interiors

Thomas Hartman, JUAN M. MALDACENA

Eric M. Howard

Recent theoretical progress shows that ([Formula: see text]) black hole solution manifests long-range topological quantum entanglement similar to exotic non-Abelian excitations with fractional quantum statistics. In topologically ordered systems, there is a deep connection between physics of the bulk and that at the boundaries. Boundary terms play an important role in explaining the black hole entropy in general. We find several common properties between BTZ black holes and the Quantum Hall effect in ([Formula: see text])-dimensional bulk/boundary theories. We calculate the topological entanglement entropy of a ([Formula: see text]) black hole and recover the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy, showing that black hole entropy and topological entanglement entropy are related. Using Chern–Simons and Liouville theories, we find that long-range entanglement describes the interior geometry of a black hole and identify it with the boundary entropy as the bond required by the connectivity of spacetime, gluing the short-range entanglement described by the area law. The IR bulk–UV boundary correspondence can be realized as a UV low-excitation theory on the bulk matching the IR long-range excitations on the boundary theory. Several aspects of the current findings are discussed.

Mir Afrasiar, Jaydeep Kumar Basak, Keun-Young Kim

We study the holographic construction of timelike entanglement entropy (tEE) in black hole backgrounds in Lorentzian geometries. The holographic tEE is realized through extremal surfaces consisting of spacelike and timelike branches that encode its real and imaginary components, respectively. In the BTZ black hole, these surfaces extend into the interior of the black hole and reproduce the field-theoretic results. The analysis is further generalized to higher-dimensional AdS-Schwarzschild black holes, where the characteristics of tEE are obtained with increasing size of the boundary subsystem. Besides, we also show that the boundary subsystem length diverges at a dimension-dependent critical turning point. Notably, this critical point moves closer to the black hole horizon as the dimensionality of the bulk increases. For large subsystem lengths, the finite part of the tEE displays a characteristic volume-plus-area structure, with a real volume term and a complex coefficient of the area term approaching constant values at large dimensions. Besides, we also study the monotonicity of a new quantity, timelike entanglement density, which offers insights into a timelike area theorem in specific limits. Subsequently, we investigate the near-horizon dynamics in various black hole backgrounds, where the spacelike and timelike surfaces exhibit exponential growth of the form $e^{\frac{2π}β Δt}$ with inverse black hole temperature $β$.

Shinji Mukohyama A

Geoff Penington

A bstract When absorbing boundary conditions are used to evaporate a black hole in AdS/CFT, we show that there is a phase transition in the location of the quantum Ryu-Takayanagi surface, at precisely the Page time. The new RT surface lies slightly inside the event horizon, at an infalling time approximately the scrambling time β/ 2 π log S BH into the past. We can immediately derive the Page curve, using the Ryu-Takayanagi formula, and the Hayden-Preskill decoding criterion, using entanglement wedge reconstruction. Because part of the interior is now encoded in the early Hawking radiation, the decreasing entanglement entropy of the black hole is exactly consistent with the semiclassical bulk entanglement of the late-time Hawking modes, despite the absence of a firewall. By studying the entanglement wedge of highly mixed states, we can understand the state dependence of the interior reconstructions. A crucial role is played by the existence of tiny, non-perturbative errors in entanglement wedge reconstruction. Directly after the Page time, interior operators can only be reconstructed from the Hawking radiation if the initial state of the black hole is known. As the black hole continues to evaporate, reconstructions become possible that simultaneously work for a large class of initial states. Using similar techniques, we generalise Hayden-Preskill to show how the amount of Hawking radiation required to reconstruct a large diary, thrown into the black hole, depends on both the energy and the entropy of the diary. Finally we argue that, before the evaporation begins, a single, state-independent interior reconstruction exists for any code space of microstates with entropy strictly less than the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, and show that this is sufficient state dependence to avoid the AMPSS typical-state firewall paradox.

Saurya Das, S. Shankaranarayanan, Sourav Sur