The Gravity Dual of Renyi Entropy

Abstract

A remarkable yet mysterious property of black holes is that their entropy is proportional to the horizon area. This area law inspired the holographic principle, which was later realized concretely in gauge/gravity duality. In this context, entanglement entropy is given by the area of a minimal surface in a dual spacetime. However, discussions of area laws have been constrained to entanglement entropy, whereas a full understanding of a quantum state requires Renyi entropies. Here we show that all Renyi entropies satisfy a similar area law in holographic theories and are given by the areas of dual cosmic branes. This geometric prescription is a one-parameter generalization of the minimal surface prescription for entanglement entropy. Applying this we provide the first holographic calculation of mutual Renyi information between two disks of arbitrary dimension. Our results provide a framework for efficiently studying Renyi entropies and understanding entanglement structures in strongly coupled systems and quantum gravity.

9 pages, 1 figure; v2: typos fixed, references and minor clarifications added; v3: references added, title and format changed to match version to be published in Nature Communications