English

Does connected wedge imply distillable entanglement?

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-02-10 v3 Quantum Physics

Abstract

The Ryu-Takayanagi formula predicts that two boundary subsystems AA and CC can exhibit large mutual information I(A:C)I(A:C) even when they are spatially disconnected on the boundary and separated by a buffer subsystem BB, as long as AA and CC have connected entanglement wedge in the bulk. However, whether the reduced state ρAC\rho_{AC} contains distillable EPR pairs has remained a longstanding open problem. In this work, we resolve this problem by showing that: i) there is no LO-distillable entanglement at leading order in GNG_N, suggesting the absence of bipartite entanglement in a holographic mixed state ρAC\rho_{AC}, and ii) one-shot, one-way LOCC-distillable entanglement is given at leading order by locally accessible information JW(AC)J^W(A|C), which is related to the entanglement wedge cross section EWE^W involving the (third) purifying system BB via JW(AC)=SAEW(A:B)J^W(A|C) = S_A - E^W(A:B). Namely, we demonstrate that a connected entanglement wedge does not necessarily imply nonzero distillable entanglement in one-shot, one-way LOCC. We also show that entanglement of formation EF(A:C)E_{F}(A:C) is given by EW(A:C)E^W(A:C) at leading order in holography.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.03426,
  title  = {Does connected wedge imply distillable entanglement?},
  author = {Takato Mori and Beni Yoshida},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.03426},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

94 pages, many figures (v1); 78 pages, the organization is greatly improved, Section 6.3 is added (v2); 77 pages, published version in JHEP (v3)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:49:26.114Z