A regularized photon-pair geometry motivated by the ER=EPR conjecture

Abstract

We regularize the Aichelburg-Sexl shock-wave geometry for massless particles by smearing the point-like source over a string-inspired length scale $l_0$. A radial extension of the transverse geometry admits a zero-throat Einstein-Rosen interpretation. For a photon wave packet of longitudinal extent $L$, the regularized gravitational self-energy of a transversely separated pair is $E_{\mathrm{GSE}}\sim \frac{4G(\hslash \omega {)}^2}{c^{4}L}\ln \left(\frac{d^2}{l_0^2}\right)$, where $d$ is the transverse separation. The factor $1/L$ strongly suppresses the interaction, giving gravitational stability times greater than $10^{30}$ years for optical photons. We also examine an effective two-dimensional entanglement-entropy description of the shock-wave geometry. The entropy construction reproduces the same dependence on the scales $d$, $L$, and $l_0$, and can be calibrated to reproduce the normalization of the direct self-energy calculation. However, we find that the gravitationally induced excess entropy, and hence the self-energy inferred from this prescription, is the same for Bell-entangled and unentangled photon pairs having identical energy-momentum distributions. This agrees with the direct geometrical calculation, since the classical two-shock metric depends on the stress-energy tensor but not on the polarization entanglement. The present construction should therefore be understood as a semiclassical ER-like geometry motivated by ER=EPR, rather than as a complete realization of the conjecture. A geometry whose connectivity tracks the amount of quantum entanglement would require a quantum-gravitational description sensitive to state-dependent correlations beyond the one-point stress-energy tensor.

10 pages, 1 figure. V2: 10 pages; change in title, discussion added. Matches published version