Beyond the entanglement/minimal surface correspondence
Abstract: “Entanglement in quantum gravity is famously associated to minimal surfaces - this includes the Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy formula where the minimal surface wraps the event horizon. The correspondence suggests entanglement is the basic building block for the emergence of geometry in quantum gravitational theories. Toy models of quantum gravitational states that demonstrate this basic idea can be constructed using random tensor networks. These networks have the same entanglement/minimal surface correspondence. However minimal surfaces give a misleading picture of tripartite entanglement, as shown recently by computations of a novel measure of such entanglement based on reflected entropy. Similarly, minimal surfaces are only a limited probe of the gravitational geometry. We discuss a general picture of reflected entropy in these states and conjecture a relation to multiway cuts, a generalization of a minimal surface with a triple intersection. This suggests that multi-partite entanglement can probe more general geometric structures of quantum gravity.
Bio: Thomas Faulkner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research group currently works on quantum information aspects of gravity and quantum field theory (QFT). They have uncovered fundamental connections between bounds on the processing of quantum information and the dynamics of quantum gravity and QFT.
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