On holographic time-like entanglement entropy

Abstract: In order to study the pseudo entropy of time-like subregions holographically, the previous smooth space-like extremal surface was recently generalized to mix space-like and time-like segments and the area becomes complex value. This paper finds that, if one tries to use such kind of piecewise smooth extremal surfaces to compute time-like entanglement entropy holographically, the complex area is not unique in general. We then generalize the original holographic proposal of space-like entanglement entropy to pick up a unique area from all allowed ``space-like+time-like'' piecewise smooth extremal surfaces for a time-like subregion. We will give some concrete examples to show the correctness of our proposal.