arXiv:1005.

3035v1 [hep-th] 17 May 2010

Building up spacetime with quantum entanglement

Mark Van Raamsdonk

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia

6224 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 1W9, Canada
[email protected]

Abstract
In this essay, we argue that the emergence of classically connected spacetimes
is intimately related to the quantum entanglement of degrees of freedom in a
non-perturbative description of quantum gravity. Disentangling the degrees of
freedom associated with two regions of spacetime results in these regions pulling
apart and pinching off from each other in a way that can be quantified by standard
measures of entanglement.

Essay written for the Gravity Research Foundation

2010 Awards for Essays on Gravitation

March 31, 2010

Introduction
The gravity / gauge theory correspondence [1, 2, 3] in string theory represents exciting
progress towards finding a general non-perturbative description of quantum gravity.
It posits that certain quantum gravitational theories with fixed spacetime asymptotic
behavior are exactly equivalent to ordinary quantum field theories. We can view this
correspondence as providing a complete non-perturbative definition of the quantum
gravity theory via a quantum field theory. However, despite a great deal of evidence
for the validity of this correspondence, we do not have a deep understanding of why or
how spacetime/gravity emerges from the degrees of freedom of the field theory.
In this essay, we will argue, based on widely accepted examples of gauge theory /
gravity duality, that the emergence of spacetime in the gravity picture is intimately
related to the quantum entanglement of degrees of freedom in the corresponding conventional quantum system. We will begin by showing that certain quantum superpositions of states corresponding to disconnected spacetimes give rise to states that are
interpreted as classically connected spacetimes. More quantitatively, we will see in a
simple example that decreasing the entanglement between two sets of degrees of freedom (e.g. by continuously varying the quantum state in the field theory description)
effectively increases the proper distance between the corresponding spacetime regions,
while decreasing the area separating the two regions.
Classical connectivity from quantum superposition
The most familiar example of gauge-theory / gravity duality involves an equivalence
between conformal field theories (CFTs) and asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetimes. For specific CFTs, each state of the field theory on a sphere ( time) corresponds
to a spacetime in some specific theory of quantum gravity where the asymptotics of
the spacetime are the same as global AdS spacetime.
Let us now consider a slightly more complicated example, where we build a larger
quantum system by taking two (non-interacting) copies of our conformal field theory on
S d . As usual, the Hilbert space for this system will be the tensor product H = H1 H2
of the Hilbert spaces for the component systems.
In our new system, the simplest quantum states to consider are product states (i.e.
states with no entanglement between the two subsystems)
|i = |1 i |2 i .
It is easy to provide a gravity interpretation for such a state. Since the degrees of
freedom of the two CFTs do not interact in any way, and since there is no entanglement
between the degrees of freedom for this state, the interpretation must be that we have
two completely separate physical systems. If |1 i is dual to one asymptotically AdS
spacetime and |2 i is dual to some other spacetime, the product state is dual to the
disconnected pair of spacetimes.
We next consider a state in which the two subsystems are entangled. If |Ei i repre-

E i

=
Ei

Ei

Figure 1: Gravity interpretations for the entangled state |()i in a quantum system
defined by a pair of noninteracting CFTs on S d times time. The diagram on the right
is the Penrose diagram for the maximally extended AdS-Schwarzschild black hole.
sents the ith energy eigenstate for a single CFT on S d , let us define the state
|()i =

Ei
2

|Ei i |Ei i

(1)

This state is a sum of product states |Ei i |Ei i. Since we just argued that each of
these product states should be interpreted on the gravity side as a spacetime with
two disconnected components, the literal interpretation of the state |()i is that it
is a quantum superposition of disconnected spacetimes. However, it has been argued
[4, 5, 6] that precisely this state |()i corresponds to the (connected) eternal AdS
black hole spacetime, whose Penrose diagram is sketched in figure 1.
The motivation for this statement is as follows. This is a spacetime with two equivalent asymptotically AdS regions, suggesting that the dual description should involve
two copies of the CFT. An observer in either asymptotic region sees the Schwarzschild
AdS black hole spacetime, which is understood [7] to correspond to the thermal state
of a conformal field theory. On the other hand, starting from the state (1), and tracing
over the degrees of freedom of one of the CFTs, we find that the density matrix for the
remaining CFT is exactly the thermal density matrix:
Tr2 (|ih|) =

eEi |Ei ihEi | = T .

Furthermore, the presence of horizons in the black hole spacetime which forbid communication between the two asymptotic regions may be naturally associated with the
absence of interactions between the two CFTs. Thus, the state |()i has properties
which are completely consistent with its interpretation as the eternal AdS black hole.
If this identification is correct, we have a remarkable conclusion: the state |()i
which clearly represents a quantum superposition of disconnected spacetimes may also
be identified with a classically connected spacetime. In this example, classical connectivity arises by entangling the degrees of freedom in the two components. In the
next section, we will try to test the idea that emergent spacetimes in gauge-theory /
2

B
~
A

Figure 2: According to [9], the entanglement entropy S(A) between regions A and B in
the field theory is related to the area of the minimal surface A in the dual geometry such

that the boundary of A coincides with the boundary of A: S(A) = Area(A)/(4G

N ).
In the diagram, spatial geometry in the gravity picture is represented by the interior
of the ball, while the geometry on which the field theory lives is identified with the
boundary sphere.
gravity duality are built up by entangling degrees of freedom in the non-perturbative
description.
A disentangling experiment
Let us return to the simpler case of a single CFT on S d . We would like to do a thought
experiment in which we start with the vacuum state of the field theory, dual to gravity
on pure global AdS spacetime, and see what happens to the dual geometry when we
gradually change the state to disentangle some of the degrees of freedom. To be specific,
we divide the sphere into two parts (e.g. hemispheres) which we label A and B.
Since the CFT is a local quantum field theory, there are specific degrees of freedom
associated with specific spatial regions, so we can decompose the Hilbert space H =
HA HB . A simple quantitative measure of the entanglement between A and B is the
entanglement entropy [8], defined to be the von Neumann entropy
S(A) = Tr(A log A )
of the density matrix for the subsystem A,
A = TrB (|ih|) .
This is typically a divergent quantity, but we can consider a field theory defined with
a cutoff (e.g. on a lattice), such that the entanglement entropy is finite. Now, starting
with the vacuum state, we can ask what happens to the dual spacetime when we
vary the quantum state in such a way that the entanglement entropy S(A) decreases.
Using the recent proposal of Ryu and Takayanagi [9], we can make a very precise
statement about what happens: the area of the minimal surface A in the dual spacetime
which separates the spherical boundary into its two components A and B decreases, in
direct proportionality to the decrease in entanglement entropy (see figure 2). Since the
surface A is a dividing surface between two regions of the dual space, we see that as
3

Figure 3: Length L of geodesic (dashed line) connecting boundary points in C and D

must go to infinity if mutual information between C and D decreases to zero.
entanglement is decreased to zero, the two regions of space are pinching off from each
other.1
Another insight into the behavior of the dual geometry as we decrease entanglement
comes from considering the mutual information [8] between any two subsystems C A
and D B, defined to be
I(C, D) = S(C) + S(D) S(C D) .
It can be shown that I(C, D) is always non-negative, and zero if and only if the density
matrix for C D is the tensor product of the density matrices for C and D. As the
entanglement between A and B decreases to zero, the mutual information between any
two regions C and D goes to zero also.
From the geometrical point of view, we will now argue that this decrease in mutual
information between C and D implies an increase the proper distance between the
corresponding regions near the boundary of spacetime. First, we note that mutual
information provides an upper bound on correlations in a system. It is straightforward
to prove [10] that for any operators OC and OD , acting only on the subsystems C and
D, we have
(hOC OD i hOC ihOD i)2
I(C, D)
.
(2)
2|OC |2 |OD |2
Thus, if we continuously vary a state such that the mutual information between C
and D go to zero, then all correlations must decrease to zero also. In the context of
AdS/CFT, certain two-point correlators of local operators (those dual to very massive particles in the dual spacetime) provide a direct measure of the proper distance
through the spacetime between the boundary points at which the operators are inserted. Specifically, we have:
hOC (xC )OD (xD )i emL

(3)

where m is the mass and L is the length of the shortest geodesic connecting xC and
xD (again, we can work in a field theory with explicit cutoff so everything is finite).
1

Here and below, we should keep in mind that the spacetime will likely cease to have a completely
geometrical description before the entanglement is strictly zero.

Figure 4: Effect on geometry of decreasing entanglement between holographic degrees

of freedom corresponding to A and B: area separating corresponding spatial regions
decreases while distance between points increases. The boundary geometry remains
fixed (despite appearances in the diagram).

larger

Figure 5: Spatial section of eternal black hole for two different temperatures (corresponding to a horizontal line through the middle of the Penrose diagram of figure 1).
For low temperature (large ), where entanglement between the two CFTs is smaller,
the asymptotic regions are further apart and separated by a surface of smaller area.
Combining (3) and (2), we see that as the entanglement between degrees of freedom
in region A and region B (and therefore the mutual information I(C, D)) drops to
zero, the length of the shortest bulk path between the points xC and xD must go
to infinity (figure 3). Together with the result of the previous subsection, we obtain
the following picture. As the entanglement between two sets of degrees of freedom in
a nonperturbative description of quantum gravity drops to zero, the proper distance
between the corresponding spacetime regions goes to infinity, while the area of the
minimal surface separating the regions decreases to zero. Roughly speaking, the two
regions of spacetime pull apart and pinch off from each other, as shown in figure 4. As
seen in figure 5, these quantitative features can be seen explicitly in the example of
the eternal AdS black hole, where we can decrease the entanglement between the two
CFTs by increasing the inverse temperature parameter .
Conclusions
We have seen that we can connect up spacetimes by entangling degrees of freedom and
5

tear them apart by disentangling. It is fascinating that the intrinsically quantum phenomenon of entanglement appears to be crucial for the emergence of classical spacetime
geometry.

Acknowledgements
This work has been supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research
Council of Canada, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Canada Research Chairs
programme.

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