English

Entanglement islands in higher dimensions

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-07-01 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

It has been suggested in recent work that the Page curve of Hawking radiation can be recovered using computations in semi-classical gravity provided one allows for "islands" in the gravity region of quantum systems coupled to gravity. The explicit computations so far have been restricted to black holes in two-dimensional Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity. In this note, we numerically construct a five-dimensional asymptotically AdS geometry whose boundary realizes a four-dimensional Hartle-Hawking state on an eternal AdS black hole in equilibrium with a bath. We also numerically find two types of extremal surfaces: ones that correspond to having or not having an island. The version of the information paradox involving the eternal black hole exists in this setup, and it is avoided by the presence of islands. Thus, recent computations exhibiting islands in two-dimensional gravity generalize to higher dimensions as well.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.09666,
  title  = {Entanglement islands in higher dimensions},
  author = {Ahmed Almheiri and Raghu Mahajan and Jorge E. Santos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.09666},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

18 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:23:45.115Z