English

Entanglement between two gravitating universes

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-09-28 v1

Abstract

We study two disjoint universes in an entangled pure state. When only one universe contains gravity, the path integral for the nthn^{\text{th}} R\'enyi entropy includes a wormhole between the nn copies of the gravitating universe, leading to a standard "island formula" for entanglement entropy consistent with unitarity of quantum information. When both universes contain gravity, gravitational corrections to this configuration lead to a violation of unitarity. However, the path integral is now dominated by a novel wormhole with 2n2n boundaries connecting replica copies of both universes. The analytic continuation of this contribution involves a quotient by Zn\mathbb{Z}_n replica symmetry, giving a cylinder connecting the two universes. When entanglement is large, this configuration has an effective description as a "swap wormhole", a geometry in which the boundaries of the two universes are glued together by a "swaperator". This description allows precise computation of a generalized entropy-like formula for entanglement entropy. The quantum extremal surface computing the entropy lives on the Lorentzian continuation of the cylinder/swap wormhole, which has a connected Cauchy slice stretching between the universes -- a realization of the ER=EPR idea. The new wormhole restores unitarity of quantum information.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.13383,
  title  = {Entanglement between two gravitating universes},
  author = {Vijay Balasubramanian and Arjun Kar and Tomonori Ugajin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.13383},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

39 pages, 11 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:34:31.145Z