English

Fundamental Complement of a Gravitating Region

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-05-30 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Quantum Physics

Abstract

Any gravitating region aa in any spacetime gives rise to a generalized entanglement wedge, the hologram e(a)e(a). Holograms exhibit properties expected of fundamental operator algebras, such as strong subadditivity, nesting, and no-cloning. But the entanglement wedge EW of an AdS boundary region BB with commutant Bˉ\bar B satisfies an additional condition, complementarity: EW(B)(B) is the spacelike complement of EW(Bˉ)(\bar B) in the bulk. Here we identify an analogue of the boundary commutant Bˉ\bar B in general spacetimes: given a gravitating region aa, its \emph{fundamental complement} a~\tilde{a} is the smallest wedge that contains all infinite world lines contained in the spacelike complement aa' of aa. We refine the definition of e(a)e(a) by requiring that it be spacelike to a~\tilde a. We prove that e(a)e(a) is the spacelike complement of e(a~)e(\tilde a) when the latter is computed in aa'. We exhibit many examples of a~\tilde{a} and of e(a)e(a) in de Sitter, flat, and cosmological spacetimes. We find that a Big Bang cosmology (spatially closed or not) is trivially reconstructible: the whole universe is the entanglement wedge of any wedge inside it. But de Sitter space is not trivially reconstructible, despite being closed. We recover the AdS/CFT prescription by proving that EW(B)=e((B)=e(causal wedge of BB).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.15886,
  title  = {Fundamental Complement of a Gravitating Region},
  author = {Raphael Bousso and Sami Kaya},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.15886},
  year   = {2025}
}