Probing phase transitions of holographic entanglement entropy with fixed area states

Understand

Recent results suggest that new corrections to holographic entanglement entropy should arise near phase transitions of the associated Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) surface.

• We study such corrections by decomposing the bulk state into fixed-area states and conjecturing that a certain `diagonal approximation' will hold.
• In terms of the bulk Newton constant $G$, this yields a correction of order $O(G^{-1/2})$ near such transitions, which is in particular larger than generic corrections from the entanglement of bulk quantum fields.
• However, the correction becomes exponentially suppressed away from the transition.