Bulk Locality from Entanglement in Gauge/Gravity Duality

Abstract: Gauge/gravity duality posits an equivalence between certain strongly coupled quantum field theories and theories of gravity with negative cosmological constant in a higher number of spacetime dimensions. The map between the degrees of freedom on the two sides is non-local and incompletely understood. I describe recent work towards characterizing this map using entanglement in the QFT, where near the dual AdS boundary, the classical energy density at a point in the bulk is stored in the relative entropies of boundary subregions whose homologous minimal surfaces pass through the bulk point. I also derive bulk classical energy conditions near the AdS boundary from entanglement inequalities in the CFT. This is based on the paper [1] with Matilde Marcolli, Hirosi Ooguri and Bogdan Stoica. More generally, in recent years, there has appeared some evidence that quantum entanglement is responsible for the emergence of spacetime. I review and comment on the state of these developments.