Comments on universal properties of entanglement entropy and bulk reconstruction

Abstract

Entanglement entropy of holographic CFTs is expected to play a crucial role in the reconstruction of semiclassical bulk gravity. We consider the entanglement entropy of spherical regions of vacuum, which is known to contain universal contributions. After perturbing the CFT with a relevant scalar operator, also the first order change of this quantity gives a universal term which only depends on a discrete set of basic CFT parameters. We show that in gravity this statement corresponds to the uniqueness of the ghost-free graviton propagator on an AdS background geometry. While the gravitational dynamics in this context contains little information about the structure of the bulk theory, there is a discrete set of dimensionless parameters of the theory which determines the entanglement entropy. We argue that for every (not necessarily holographic) CFT, any reasonable gravity model can be used to compute this particular entanglement entropy. We elucidate how this statement is consistent with AdS/CFT and also give various generalizations. On the one hand this illustrates the remarkable usefulness of geometric concepts for understanding entanglement in general CFTs. On the other hand, it provides hints as to what entanglement data can be expected to provide enough information to distinguish, e.g., bulk theories with different higher curvature couplings.

37 pages; v2: added references; v3: minor clarifications and added references (published version)

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• Entropy functionals and c-theorems from the second law
• On the reconstruction of Lifshitz spacetimes
• Bulk geometry from entanglement entropy of CFT
• Nonlocal multi-trace sources and bulk entanglement in holographic conformal field theories
• Gravity from Entanglement and RG Flow in a Top-down Approach