The Capacity of Entanglement and Holographic Entropies at Finite Resources

Abstract

The Ryu-Takayanagi formula equates the area of a minimal surface with the von Neumann entropy of a boundary subregion, and leaves two things about that identification open. The first is how sharply a geometry fixes an entropy. Fannes-Audenaert answers with a Hilbert-space dimension, which diverges as the cutoff is removed however close the two states are. We replace it with the capacity of entanglement, the variance of the modular energy, whose square root grows like the square root of the entangling area where the dimensional factor grows like the regulated volume. The bound is dimension-free and saturated, and it makes the ambiguity of the entropy subextensive for any perturbation whose capacity is small compared with $S_{vN}^2$ times the trace norm. The second is what the area means for a single state, since compression and dilution rates are defined only for many copies while a geometry describes one. When a single replica saddle dominates near $α= 1$, every smooth Rényi entropy at fixed $α> 1$ agrees with $S_{vN}$ to $\textit{O}(\sqrt{S_{vN}})$, as do the smooth min- and max-entropies. The minimal surface therefore fixes every one-shot entropy of the state at once, with large central charge playing the role of large copy number in the asymptotic equipartition property. As a consequence we bound how far outside the holographic entropy cone a holographic state can appear to fall, leaving estimation and certification open.