English

Testing holographic entropy inequalities in 2+1 dimensions

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-05-22 v2

Abstract

We address the question of whether holographic entropy inequalities obeyed in static states (by the RT formula) are always obeyed in time-dependent states (by the HRT formula), focusing on the case where the bulk spacetime is 2+1 dimensional. An affirmative answer to this question was previously claimed by Czech-Dong. We point out an error in their proof when the bulk is multiply connected. We nonetheless find strong support, of two kinds, for an affirmative answer in that case. We extend the Czech-Dong proof for simply-connected spacetimes to spacetimes with π1=Z\pi_1=\mathbb{Z} (i.e. 2-boundary, genus-0 wormholes). Specializing to vacuum solutions, we also numerically test thousands of distinct inequalities (including all known RT inequalities for up to 6 regions) on millions of randomly chosen configurations of regions and bulk spacetimes, including three different multiply-connected topologies; we find no counterexamples. In an appendix, we prove some (dimension-independent) facts about degenerate HRT surfaces and symmetry breaking.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.07165,
  title  = {Testing holographic entropy inequalities in 2+1 dimensions},
  author = {Brianna Grado-White and Guglielmo Grimaldi and Matthew Headrick and Veronika E. Hubeny},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.07165},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

30 pages. Watch a 4-minute video abstract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ols92YU8rus

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:34:51.906Z