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Generalized entropy of gravitational fluctuations

Speaker
Sean Colin-Ellerin
Date
Mon February 10th 2025, 2:00 - 3:30pm
Affiliation
UC Berkeley
Event Sponsor
Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics
Location
Varian 355

Quantum corrections to holographic entanglement entropy are well-understood for ordinary quantum matter in a classical gravitational background. These famously lead to a unitary Page curve for evaporating black holes in AdS (coupled to a bath). However, the correct treatment of quantum fluctuations of the metric, including graviton excitations, is a longstanding problem. I will provide a gauge-invariant prescription for the generalized entropy of gravitons in anti-de Sitter space in terms of areas and bulk entanglement entropy, generalizing the quantum extremal surface prescription to accommodate fluctuations in the semiclassical spacetime geometry. I will give some justification for the prescription using covariant phase techniques and explicitly check it in a non-trivial example.