Paper detail

Holography from Decoherence and Entanglement

We describe an explicit mechanism for the emergence of a dynamical holographic bulk from the structure of entanglement in a quantum state. We start with a generic system in complete isolation, assuming it has a classical limit involving coherent states. Then we entangle it with another system of that kind, and subject the pair to a decohering process. We make a number of broadly applicable and physically reasonable assumptions about this setup. First, we assume that the states selected by the decoherence (called pointer states) have the same local symmetries as the isolated systems, in a sense which is made precise. We also assume that the modular Hamiltonians of pointer states scale inversely with Planck's constant, so that the pointer states are highly entangled in the classical limit. Finally, we require the timescale of decoherence to scale in a certain way with Planck's constant, so that decoherence happens very frequently in the classical limit, but not too frequently. Given these assumptions, we demonstrate that the semiclassical evolution of the system is dominated by a certain dynamical generalisation of Uhlmann holonomy. We construct a coherent state path integral for this evolution, showing that the semiclassical fields evolve in a spacetime with one more dimension than the isolated case. The additional dimension is generated by modular flow.