Wilson Lines and Entanglement Entropy in Higher Spin Gravity

Understand

Holographic entanglement entropy provides a direct connection between classical geometry and quantum entanglement; however the usual prescription does not apply to theories of higher spin gravity, where standard notions of geometry are no longer gauge invariant.

• We present a proposal for the holographic computation of entanglement entropy in field theories dual to higher spin theories of gravity in AdS3.
• These theories have a Chern-Simons description, and our proposal involves a Wilson line in an infinite-dimensional representation of the bulk gauge group.
• In the case of spin-2 gravity such Wilson lines are the natural coupling of a heavy point particle to gravity and so are equivalent to the usual prescription of Ryu and Takayanagi.