Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

UC Santa Barbara

UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works bannerUC Santa Barbara

A paucity of bulk entangling surfaces: AdS wormholes with de Sitter interiors

Abstract

We study and construct spacetimes, dubbed planar AdS-dS-wormholes, satisfying the null energy condition and having two asymptotically AdS boundaries connected through a (non-traversable) inflating wormhole. As for other wormholes, it is natural to expect dual descriptions in terms of two disconnected conformal field theories (CFTs) in appropriate entangled states. But for our cases, certain expected bulk entangling surfaces used by the Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi (HRT) prescription to compute CFT entropy do not exist. In particular, no real codimension-2 extremal surface can run from one end of the wormhole to the other. According to HRT, the mutual information between any two finite-sized subregions (one in each CFT) must then vanish at leading order in large N - though the leading-order mutual information per unit area between the two CFTs taken as wholes may be nonzero. Some planar AdS-dS-wormholes also fail to have plane-symmetric surfaces that would compute the total entropy of either CFT. We suggest this to remain true of less-symmetric surfaces so that the HRT entropy is ill-defined and some modified prescription is required. It may be possible to simply extend HRT or the closely-related maximin construction by a limiting procedure, though complex extremal surfaces could also play an important role.

Many UC-authored scholarly publications are freely available on this site because of the UC's open access policies. Let us know how this access is important for you.

Main Content
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Current View