Bulk Locality and Entanglement Swapping in AdS/CFT

Understand

Localized bulk excitations in AdS/CFT are produced by operators which modify the pattern of entanglement in the boundary state.

• We show that simple models--consisting of entanglement swapping operators acting on a qubit system or a free field theory--capture qualitative features of gravitational backreaction and reproduce predictions of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula.
• These entanglement swapping operators naturally admit multiple representations associated with different degrees of freedom, thereby reproducing the code subspace structure emphasized by Almheiri, Dong, and Harlow.
• We also show that the boundary Reeh-Schlieder theorem implies that equivalence of certain operators on a code subspace necessarily breaks down when non-perturbative effects are taken into account (as is expected based on bulk arguments).