Generalized entropy of gravitational fluctuations

TL;DR

This paper develops a gauge-invariant method to compute the generalized entropy of gravitons in AdS space, extending quantum extremal surface techniques to include metric fluctuations and verifying the approach with explicit calculations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel gauge-invariant prescription for the generalized entropy of gravitons, incorporating metric fluctuations into holographic entanglement entropy calculations.

Findings

The prescription matches von Neumann entropies for stress-tensor states in holographic CFTs.

Explicit computation confirms the validity of the approach in AdS-Rindler backgrounds.

Identifies graviton states with larger generalized entropy than typical low-energy excitations.

Abstract

The corrections to holographic entanglement entropy from bulk quantum fields in a classical gravitational background are now well understood. They lead, in particular, to unitary Page curves for evaporating black holes. However, the correct treatment of quantum fluctuations of the metric, including graviton excitations, is a longstanding problem. We provide a gauge-invariant prescription for the generalized entropy of gravitons in anti-de Sitter space in terms of areas and bulk entanglement entropy, generalizing the quantum extremal surface prescription to accommodate fluctuations in the semiclassical spacetime geometry. This task requires a careful treatment of the area operator on the graviton Hilbert space and the definition of a "quantum extremal gauge" in which the extremal surface is unperturbed. It also requires us to determine the correct vacuum modular Hamiltonian for the graviton field, which we fix by requiring that it doesn't contain a boundary term in extremal gauge. We check our prescription with an explicit computation of the vacuum-subtracted generalized entropy of states containing a graviton in an AdS-Rindler background. Our results exactly match vacuum-subtracted von Neumann entropies for stress-tensor excited states in holographic conformal field theory with $d>2$ dimensions. We also use covariant phase space techniques to give a partial proof of our prescription when the entanglement wedge for the background spacetime has a bifurcate Killing horizon. Along the way, we identify a class of perturbative graviton states that have parametrically larger generalized entropy, in the small $G_N$ expansion, than any low-energy excitations of an ordinary quantum field.