https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6513/198
Spacetime, reconstructed: Theories of holographic duality feature a correspondence between a gravitational system and a strongly interacting conformal field theory (CFT) living on the system's boundary. Through this correspondence, the CFT encodes the geometry of spacetime in the gravitational system. Van Raamsdonk analyzed the role of entanglement in this theoretical framework. Instead of considering a single CFT, the author's starting point was a collection of CFT “bits” that are mutually entangled but do not interact with one another. The spacetime that these bits collectively encode was then shown to be arbitrarily close to the one encoded by the original CFT, suggesting that entanglement plays a crucial role in the emergence of spacetime.
ABSTRACT: In the anti–de Sitter/conformal field theory approach to quantum gravity, the spacetime geometry and gravitational physics of states in some quantum theory of gravity are encoded in the quantum states of an ordinary nongravitational system. Here, I demonstrate that this nongravitational system can be replaced with an arbitrarily large collection of noninteracting systems (“bits”) placed in a highly entangled state. This construction makes manifest the idea that spacetime geometry emerges from entanglement between the fundamental degrees of freedom of quantum gravity and that removing this entanglement is tantamount to disintegrating spacetime. This setup also reveals that the entangled states encoding spacetimes may be well represented by a certain type of tensor network in which the individual tensors are associated with states of small numbers of bits. (MORE or access to paper)
Spacetime, reconstructed: Theories of holographic duality feature a correspondence between a gravitational system and a strongly interacting conformal field theory (CFT) living on the system's boundary. Through this correspondence, the CFT encodes the geometry of spacetime in the gravitational system. Van Raamsdonk analyzed the role of entanglement in this theoretical framework. Instead of considering a single CFT, the author's starting point was a collection of CFT “bits” that are mutually entangled but do not interact with one another. The spacetime that these bits collectively encode was then shown to be arbitrarily close to the one encoded by the original CFT, suggesting that entanglement plays a crucial role in the emergence of spacetime.
ABSTRACT: In the anti–de Sitter/conformal field theory approach to quantum gravity, the spacetime geometry and gravitational physics of states in some quantum theory of gravity are encoded in the quantum states of an ordinary nongravitational system. Here, I demonstrate that this nongravitational system can be replaced with an arbitrarily large collection of noninteracting systems (“bits”) placed in a highly entangled state. This construction makes manifest the idea that spacetime geometry emerges from entanglement between the fundamental degrees of freedom of quantum gravity and that removing this entanglement is tantamount to disintegrating spacetime. This setup also reveals that the entangled states encoding spacetimes may be well represented by a certain type of tensor network in which the individual tensors are associated with states of small numbers of bits. (MORE or access to paper)