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Entanglement between two gravitating universes

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Abstract

We study two disjoint universes in an entangled pure state. When only one universe contains gravity, the path integral for the $n^{\text{th}}$ R\'enyi 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 $\mathbb{Z}_n$ 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.
Original languageEnglish
Article number174001
Number of pages34
JournalClassical and Quantum Gravity
Volume39
Issue number17
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Aug 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank Kanato Goto, Javier Magán, Onkar Parrikar, Edgar Shaghoulian, and Tadashi Takayanagi for useful discussions. VB is supported in part by the Department of Energy through Grant DE-SC0013528 and Grant QuantISED DE-SC0020360, as well as the Simons Foundation through the It From Qubit Collaboration (Grant No. 38559). AK is supported by the Simons Foundation through the It from Qubit Collaboration. TU is supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists 19K14716.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd.

Copyright:
Copyright 2022 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Keywords

  • hep-th

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