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Stückelberg Formulation of Holography

We suggest that holography can be formulated in terms of the information capacity of the Stückelberg degrees of freedom that maintain gauge invariance of the theory in the presence of an information boundary. These Stückelbergs act as qubits that account for a certain fraction of quantum information. Their information capacity is measured by the ratio of the inverse Stückelberg energy gap to the size of the system. Systems with the smallest gap are maximally holographic. For massless gauge systems this information measure is universally equal to the inverse coupling evaluated at the systems' length scale. In this language it becomes very transparent why the Stückelberg information capacity of black holes saturates the Bekenstein bound and accounts for the entire information of the system. The physical reason is that the strength of quantum interaction is bounded from below by the gravitational coupling, which scales as area. Observing the striking similarity between the scalings of the energy gap of the boundary Stückelberg modes and the Bogoliubov modes of critical many-body systems, we establish a connection between holography and quantum criticality through the correspondence between these modes.