Holographic EPR Pairs, Wormholes and Radiation

TL;DR

This paper explores how the causal structure of holographic strings dual to entangled quark-antiquark pairs reveals wormholes and horizons, linking radiation emission to entanglement and spacetime geometry.

Contribution

It demonstrates that generic quark-antiquark trajectories can produce wormholes and horizons on the string worldsheet, extending the ER=EPR correspondence beyond uniform acceleration cases.

Findings

Worldsheet horizons appear for generic trajectories with radiation.

Radiation emission correlates with the presence of a wormhole on the worldsheet.

Causal structure changes are linked to gluonic radiation in the gauge theory.

Abstract

As evidence for the ER=EPR conjecture, it has recently been observed that the string that is holographically dual to an entangled quark-antiquark pair separating with (asymptotically) uniform acceleration has a wormhole on its worldsheet. We point out that a two-sided horizon and a wormhole actually appear for much more generic quark-antiquark trajectories, which is consistent with the fact that the members of an EPR pair need not be permanently out of causal contact. The feature that determines whether the causal structure of the string worldsheet is trivial or not turns out to be the emission of gluonic radiation by the dual quark and antiquark. In the strongly-coupled gauge theory, it is only when radiation is emitted that one obtains an unambiguous separation of the pair into entangled subsystems, and this is what is reflected on the gravity side by the existence of the worldsheet horizon.