English

Probing black hole entropy via entanglement

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-03-05 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a method to extract the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of DD-dimensional black holes using the entanglement entropy of a lower-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT). This approach relies on two key observations. On the gravitational side, the near-horizon geometry of extremal black holes is AdS2_{2}, and the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy is entirely determined by this two-dimensional geometry. Moreover, the higher-dimensional spherical part of the black hole metric is absorbed into the DD-dimensional Newton's constant GN(D)G_{N}^{\left(D\right)}, which can be effectively reduced to a two-dimensional Newton's constant GN(2)G_{N}^{\left(2\right)}. On the field theory side, the entanglement entropy of two disconnected one-dimensional conformal quantum mechanics (CQM1_{1}) can be calculated. According to the Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) prescription, this entanglement entropy computes the area of the minimal surface in the AdS2_{2} geometry. Since the near-horizon region of the black hole and the emergent spacetime derived from the entanglement entropy share the same Penrose diagram -- with both the black hole event horizon and the RT surface corresponding to specific points on this diagram -- the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy can be probed via entanglement entropy when these points coincide. This result explicitly demonstrates that the entanglement across the event horizon is the fundamental origin of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.08012,
  title  = {Probing black hole entropy via entanglement},
  author = {Shuxuan Ying},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.08012},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

V1: 20 pages, 12 figures; V2: 22pages, 12 figures, references added, published version in Nucl. Phys. B