Defect extremal surface for reflected entropy

Defect extremal surface is defined by extremizing the Ryu-Takayanagi formula corrected by the quantum defect theory. This is interesting when the AdS bulk contains a defect brane (or string). We introduce a defect extremal surface formula for reflected entropy, which is a mixed state generalization of entanglement entropy measure. Based on a decomposition procedure of an AdS bulk with a brane, we demonstrate the equivalence between defect extremal surface formula and island formula for reflected entropy in AdS3/BCFT2. We also compute the evolution of reflected entropy in evaporating black hole model and find that defect extremal surface formula agrees with island formula.

Finding pythons in unexpected places

We argue that novel (highly nonclassical) quantum extremal surfaces play a crucial role in reconstructing the black hole interior even for isolated, single-sided, non-evaporating black holes (i.e. with no auxiliary reservoir). Specifically, any code subspace where interior outgoing modes can be excited will have a quantum extremal surface in its maximally mixed state. We argue that as a result, reconstruction of interior outgoing modes is always exponentially complex. Our construction provides evidence in favor of a strong Python’s lunch proposal: that nonminimal quantum extremal surfaces are the exclusive source of exponential complexity in the holographic dictionary. We also comment on the relevance of these quantum extremal surfaces to the geometrization of state dependence in the typicality arguments for firewalls.

Entanglement between two gravitating universes

We study two disjoint universes in an entangled pure state. When only one universe contains gravity, the path integral for the n th Rényi entropy includes a wormhole between the n copies of the gravitating universe, leading to a standard “island formula” for entanglement entropy consistent with unitarity of quantum information. When both universes contain gravity, gravitational corrections to this configuration lead to a violation of unitarity. However, the path integral is now dominated by a novel wormhole with 2n boundaries connecting replica copies of both universes. The analytic continuation of this contribution involves a quotient by Ζ n replica symmetry, giving a cylinder connecting the two universes. When entanglement is large, this configuration has an effective description as a “swap wormhole”, a geometry in which the boundaries of the two universes are glued together by a “swaperator”. This description allows precise computation of a generalized entropy-like formula for entanglement entropy. The quantum extremal surface computing the entropy lives on the Lorentzian continuation of the cylinder/swap wormhole, which has a connected Cauchy slice stretching between the universes – a realization of the ER=EPR idea. The new wormhole restores unitarity of quantum information.

Quantum Extremal Surfaces and the Holographic Entropy Cone

Quantum states with geometric duals are known to satisfy a stricter set of entropy inequalities than those obeyed by general quantum systems. The set of allowed entropies derived using the Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) formula defines the Holographic Entropy Cone (HEC). These inequalities are no longer satisfied once general quantum corrections are included by employing the Quantum Extremal Surface (QES) prescription. Nevertheless, the structure of the QES formula allows for a controlled study of how quantum contributions from bulk entropies interplay with HEC inequalities. In this paper, we initiate an exploration of this problem by relating bulk entropy constraints to boundary entropy inequalities. In particular, we show that requiring the bulk entropies to satisfy the HEC implies that the boundary entropies also satisfy the HEC. Further, we also show that requiring the bulk entropies to obey monogamy of mutual information (MMI) implies the boundary entropies also obey MMI.

The Markov gap for geometric reflected entropy

The reflected entropy SR(A : B) of a density matrix ρAB is a bipartite correlation measure lower-bounded by the quantum mutual information I(A : B). In holographic states satisfying the quantum extremal surface formula, where the reflected entropy is related to the area of the entanglement wedge cross-section, there is often an order-N2 gap between SR and I. We provide an information-theoretic interpretation of this gap by observing that SR− I is related to the fidelity of a particular Markov recovery problem that is impossible in any state whose entanglement wedge cross-section has a nonempty boundary; for this reason, we call the quantity SR− I the Markov gap. We then prove that for time-symmetric states in pure AdS3 gravity, the Markov gap is universally lower bounded by log(2)ℓAdS/2GN times the number of endpoints of the cross-section. We provide evidence that this lower bound continues to hold in the presence of bulk matter, and comment on how it might generalize above three bulk dimensions. Finally, we explore the Markov recovery problem controlling SR− I using fixed area states. This analysis involves deriving a formula for the quantum fidelity — in fact, for all the sandwiched Rényi relative entropies — between fixed area states with one versus two fixed areas, which may be of independent interest. We discuss, throughout the paper, connections to the general theory of multipartite entanglement in holography.

Islands and Page curves of Reissner-Nordström black holes

We apply the recently proposed quantum extremal surface construction to calculate the Page curve of the eternal Reissner-Nordström black holes in four dimensions ignoring the backreaction and the greybody factor. Without the island, the entropy of Hawking radiation grows linearly with time, which results in the information paradox for the eternal black holes. By extremizing the generalized entropy that allows the contributions from the island, we find that the island extends to the outside the horizon of the Reissner-Nordström black hole. When taking the effect of the islands into account, it is shown that the entanglement entropy of Hawking radiation at late times for a given region far from the black hole horizon reproduces the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the Reissner-Nordström black hole with an additional term representing the effect of the matter fields. The result is consistent with the finiteness of the entanglement entropy for the radiation from an eternal black hole. This facilitates to address the black hole information paradox issue in the current case under the above-mentioned approximations.

Cosmological singularities, entanglement and quantum extremal surfaces

We study aspects of entanglement and extremal surfaces in various families of spacetimes exhibiting cosmological, Big-Crunch, singularities, in particular isotropic AdS Kasner. The classical extremal surface dips into the bulk radial and time directions. Explicitly analysing the extremization equations in the semiclassical region far from the singularity, we find the surface bends in the direction away from the singularity. In the 2-dim cosmologies obtained by dimensional reduction of these and other singularities, we have studied quantum extremal surfaces by extremizing the generalized entropy. The resulting extremization shows the quantum extremal surfaces to always be driven to the semiclassical region far from the singularity. We give some comments and speculations on our analysis.

Leading order corrections to the quantum extremal surface prescription

We show that a naïve application of the quantum extremal surface (QES) prescription can lead to paradoxical results and must be corrected at leading order. The corrections arise when there is a second QES (with strictly larger generalized entropy at leading order than the minimal QES), together with a large amount of highly incompressible bulk entropy between the two surfaces. We trace the source of the corrections to a failure of the assumptions used in the replica trick derivation of the QES prescription, and show that a more careful derivation correctly computes the corrections. Using tools from one-shot quantum Shannon theory (smooth min- and max-entropies), we generalize these results to a set of refined conditions that determine whether the QES prescription holds. We find similar refinements to the conditions needed for entanglement wedge reconstruction (EWR), and show how EWR can be reinterpreted as the task of one-shot quantum state merging (using zero-bits rather than classical bits), a task gravity is able to achieve optimally efficiently.

Island in charged black holes

We study the information paradox for the eternal black hole with charges on a doubly-holographic model in general dimensions, where the charged black hole on a Planck brane is coupled to the baths on the conformal boundaries. In the case of weak tension, the brane can be treated as a probe such that its backreaction to the bulk is negligible. We analytically calculate the entanglement entropy of the radiation and obtain the Page curve with the presence of an island on the brane. For the near-extremal black holes, the growth rate is linear in the temperature. Taking both Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati term and nonzero tension into account, we obtain the numerical solution with backreaction in four-dimensional spacetime and find the quantum extremal surface at t = 0. To guarantee that a Page curve can be obtained in general cases, we propose two strategies to impose enough degrees of freedom on the brane such that the black hole information paradox can be properly described by the doubly-holographic setup.

Defect extremal surface as the holographic counterpart of Island formula

We propose defect extremal surface as the holographic counterpart of boundary quantum extremal surface. The defect extremal surface is defined by minimizing the Ryu-Takayanagi surface corrected by the defect theory. This is particularly interesting when the RT surface crosses or terminates on the defect. In a simple set up of AdS/BCFT, we find that the defect extremal surface formula gives precisely the same results of the boundary quantum extremal surface. We provide a decomposition procedure of an AdS bulk with a defect brane to see clearly how quantum extremal surface formula emerges from a brane world system with gravity glued to a flat space quantum field theory.