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 AdS 3 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.

United States

Vijay Balasubramanian

Borun Chowdhury

Bartłlomiej Czech

Netherlands

Jan Boer

Entwinement and the emergence of spacetime

Several recent papers argue against firewalls by relaxing the requirement for locality outside the stretched horizon. In the firewall argument, locality essentially serves the purpose of ensuring that the degrees of freedom required for infall are those in the proximity of the black hole and not the ones in the early radiation. We make the firewall argument sharper by utilizing the AdS/CFT framework and claim that the firewall argument essentially states that the dual to a thermal state in the CFT is a firewall.

India

Steven Avery

Firewalls in AdS/CFT

We present an analysis parallel to that of Giusto, Ross, and Saxena (arXiv:0708.3845) and construct a discrete family of non-supersymmetric microstate geometries of the Maldacena-Strominger-Witten system. The supergravity configuration in which we look for the smooth microstates is constructed using SO(4, 4) dualities applied to an appropriate seed solution. The SO(4, 4) approach offers certain technical advantages. Our microstate solutions are smooth in five dimensions, as opposed to all previously known non-supersymmetric microstates with AdS 3 cores, which are smooth only in six dimensions. The decoupled geometries for our microstates are related to global AdS 3 × S 2 by spectral flows.

Souvik Banerjee

Bert Vercnocke

Amitabh Virmani

Non-supersymmetric microstates of the MSW system