Entwinement and the emergence of spacetime

By Vijay Balasubramanian, Borun D. Chowdhury, B. Czech, J. Boer. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2014

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is conventional to study the entanglement between spatial regions of a quantum field theory. However, in some systems entanglement can be dominated by “internal”, possibly gauged, degrees of freedom that are not spatially organized, and that can give rise to gaps smaller than the inverse size of the system. In a holographic context, such small gaps are associated to the appearance of horizons and singularities in the dual spacetime. Here, we propose a concept of entwinement, which is intended to capture this fine structure of the wavefunction. Holographically, entwinement probes the entanglement shadow — the region of spacetime not probed by the minimal surfaces that compute spatial entanglement in the dual field theory. We consider the simplest example of this scenario — a 2d conformal field theory (CFT) that is dual to a conical defect in AdS3 space. Following our previous work, we show that spatial entanglement in the CFT reproduces spacetime geometry up to a finite distance from the conical defect. We then show that the interior geometry up to the defect can be reconstructed from entwinement that is sensitive to the discretely gauged, fractionated degrees of freedom of the CFT. Entwinement in the CFT is related to non-minimal geodesics in the conical defect geometry, suggesting a potential quantum information theoretic meaning for these objects in a holographic context. These results may be relevant for the reconstruction of black hole interiors from a dual field theory.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6277d3708e048519ac938065c69e5f12f40621ba

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. M. Rangamani
2. T. Takayanagi
3. J. Sully
4. B. Czech
5. D. Harlow
6. L. Lamprou
7. Sam McCandlish
8. V. Hubeny

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. D. Harlow
2. M. Rangamani
3. T. Takayanagi
4. J. Sully
5. V. Hubeny
6. B. Czech
7. D. Stanford
8. S. Raju

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. D. Harlow
2. M. Rangamani
3. T. Takayanagi
4. J. Sully
5. B. Czech
6. V. Hubeny
7. L. Lamprou
8. Sam McCandlish

Citations in the corpus

• Holographic Entanglement Entropy (2016, background): “ been surprisingly hard to answer though there is now evidence that the subregion/subregion duality does involve a boundary reconstruction of the entanglement wedge [173,96,159]. 1 Some authors e.g., [171] have taken to calling such regions the entanglement shadow, inspired by the idea of a causal s”
• A stereoscopic look into the bulk (2016, unknown): “lso quotients of the AdS 3 { 40 { Figure 20: Geodesic operators on excited CFT 2 states can be obtained by taking a quotient both of AdS 3 and of kinematic space. Winding (entwinement-type) geodesics [53] correspond to boundary operators smeared over wrapping diamonds. kinematic space, a fact that w”
• Integral geometry and holography (2015, methodology): “When the geometry contains nonminimal geodesics, our method will require a generalization along the lines of [35, 53].”
• Bit Threads and Holographic Entanglement (2016, unknown): “Including enough thread configurations would allow the entire bulkmetric to be determined via the above construction, including inside so-called “entanglement shadow” regions, where RT minimal surfaces do not pass [35,38,39].”