A holographic derivation of the entanglement entropy in quantum (conformal) field theories is proposed from anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence. We argue that the entanglement entropy in d + 1 dimensional conformal field theories can be obtained from the area of d dimensional minimal surfaces in AdS(d+2), analogous to the Bekenstein-Hawking formula for black hole entropy. We show that our proposal agrees perfectly with the entanglement entropy in 2D CFT when applied to AdS(3). We also compare the entropy computed in AdS(5)XS(5) with that of the free N=4 super Yang-Mills theory.
How to calculate the entanglement entropy between two subsystems for a mixed state has remained an important problem. In this paper, we provide a straightforward method, namely the subtraction approach, to solve this problem for generic covariant bipartite mixed states, where time dependence is explicitly included. We further demonstrate that the mixed state entanglement entropy
SvN can be calculated in a more abstract yet powerful way. Within the context of the AdS
3/CFT
2 and a configuration of AdS
5/CFT
4 correspondences, we show that
SvN exactly matches the corresponding entanglement wedge cross section in the AdS bulk, respectively.