Boundary mutual information in double holography

TL;DR

This paper investigates boundary mutual information in a double holography setup with AdS$_3$ gravity coupled to a heat bath, revealing phase transitions and the decomposition into geometric and quantum field contributions, with negative bulk quantum effects.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical surface optimization method to compute boundary mutual information and analyzes the negative quantum field contributions within a double holography framework.

Findings

Identifies a phase transition in BMI as subregion separation increases.

Decomposes BMI into geometric and quantum field components, with the latter being negative.

Reproduces negative quantum field contributions using a tensor network toy model.

Abstract

We consider a composite system where AdS$_3$ gravity is coupled to a flat heat bath and investigate the mutual information between two subregions on the intersection of the AdS$_3$ and bath, referred to as the boundary mutual information (BMI). The corresponding entanglement entropy is captured via quantum extremal surfaces (QES), which holographically be computed by a surface optimization algorithm based on ``Surface Evolver''. We focus on both connected and disconnected configurations of the quantum entanglement wedge (Q-EW) in the AdS$_3$ bulk and analyze the finite corrections to the BMI. Our numerical results reveal a phase transition of the BMI as the separation between two subregions increases. Furthermore, we find that the BMI can naturally be decomposed into two distinct components: a geometric term arising from the areas of the quantum extremal surfaces, and a correction term resulting from bulk quantum fields within the Q-EW. Interestingly, the geometric contribution always exceeds the total BMI, indicating a negative correction from the bulk matter fields. This negativity can be understood as the result of subtracting a greater contribution from quantum fields in the connected Q-EW than in the disconnected one. We also reproduce the negative contribution of bulk quantum fields to BMI within a random tensor network (RTN) toy model of double holography. Modeling the bulk as a highly mixed state entangled with a large bath leads to a volume-law bulk entropy. In the large bond-dimension limit, the geometric part of the BMI remains non-negative, while the bulk entropy contribution becomes non-positive when the Q-EWs merge.