Looking at shadows of entanglement wedges

Abstract

Abstract We present a new method of deriving shapes of entanglement wedges directly from conformal field theory (CFT) calculations. We point out that a reduced density matrix in holographic CFTs possesses a sharp wedge structure such that inside the wedge we can distinguish two local excitations, while outside we cannot. We can determine this wedge, which we call a CFT wedge, by computing a distinguishability measure. We find that CFT wedges defined by the fidelity or Bures distance as a distinguishability measure coincide perfectly with shadows of entanglement wedges in anti-de Sitter (AdS)/CFT. We confirm this agreement between CFT wedges and entanglement wedges for two-dimensional holographic CFTs where the subsystem is chosen to be an interval or double intervals, as well as higher-dimensional CFTs with a round ball subsystem. On the other hand, if we consider a free scalar CFT, we find that there are no sharp CFT wedges. This shows that sharp entanglement wedges emerge only for holographic CFTs owing to the large-$N$ factorization. We also generalize our analysis to a time-dependent example and to a holographic boundary conformal field theory (AdS/BCFT). Finally, we study other distinguishability measures to define CFT wedges. We observe that some of the measures lead to CFT wedges which slightly deviate from the entanglement wedges in AdS/CFT, and we give a heuristic explanation for this. This paper is an extended version of our earlier letter (arXiv:1908.09939 [hep-th]) and includes various new observations and examples.