Holographic Heat Engines, Entanglement Entropy, and Renormalization Group Flow

Understand

We explore a fruitful connection between the physics of conformal field theories (CFTs) in d-dimensional Minkowski spacetime and the extended gravitational thermodynamics of hyperbolic black holes in (d+1)-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime.

• The CFTs are reduced on a region bounded by a sphere.
• We show that Renormalization Group (RG) flows between CFTs are specific thermodynamic processes in the (p,V) plane, where the irreversibility of coarse-graining flows from the ultraviolet to the infrared corresponds to the Second Law of thermodynamics, preventing heat from flowing from low temperature to high.
• We observe that holographic heat engines using the black holes as a working substance correspond to specific combinations of CFT flows and deformations.