Entwinement in discretely gauged theories

Abstract

We develop the notion of “entwinement” to characterize the amount of quantum entanglement between internal, discretely gauged degrees of freedom in a quantum field theory. This concept originated in the program of reconstructing spacetime from entanglement in holographic duality. We define entwinement formally in terms of a novel replica method which uses twist operators charged in a representation of the discrete gauge group. In terms of these twist operators we define a non-local, gauge-invariant object whose expectation value computes entwinement in a standard replica limit. We apply our method to the computation of entwinement in symmetric orbifold conformal field theories in 1+1 dimensions, which have an SN gauging. Such a theory appears in the weak coupling limit of the D1-D5 string theory which is dual to AdS3 at strong coupling. In this context, we show how certain kinds of entwinement measure the lengths, in units of the AdS scale, of non-minimal geodesics present in certain excited states of the system which are gravitationally described as conical defects and the M = 0 BTZ black hole. The possible types of entwinement that can be computed define a very large new class of quantities characterizing the fine structure of quantum wavefunctions.