Consistency Conditions for an AdS/MERA Correspondence

TL;DR

This paper investigates the proposed AdS/MERA correspondence, deriving necessary geometric and entropy-based conditions, and finds limitations in the MERA's ability to fully replicate bulk physics, suggesting the need for modified tensor networks.

Contribution

It establishes geometric and entropy-based constraints on the AdS/MERA correspondence, highlighting limitations and proposing directions for improved tensor network models.

Findings

MERA can only describe physics at scales larger than the AdS radius.

No conventional MERA parameters fully reproduce bulk physics on super-AdS scales.

Modifications to tensor networks may be necessary for a more complete AdS/MERA correspondence.

Abstract

The Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (MERA) is a tensor network that provides an efficient way of variationally estimating the ground state of a critical quantum system. The network geometry resembles a discretization of spatial slices of an AdS spacetime and "geodesics" in the MERA reproduce the Ryu-Takayanagi formula for the entanglement entropy of a boundary region in terms of bulk properties. It has therefore been suggested that there could be an AdS/MERA correspondence, relating states in the Hilbert space of the boundary quantum system to ones defined on the bulk lattice. Here we investigate this proposal and derive necessary conditions for it to apply, using geometric features and entropy inequalities that we expect to hold in the bulk. We show that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the MERA lattice can only describe physics on length scales larger than the AdS radius. Further, using the covariant entropy bound in the bulk, we show that there are no conventional MERA parameters that completely reproduce bulk physics even on super-AdS scales. We suggest modifications or generalizations of this kind of tensor network that may be able to provide a more robust correspondence.