On Universality of Holographic Results for (2+1)-Dimensional CFTs on Curved Spacetimes

The behavior of holographic CFTs is constrained by the existence of a bulk dual geometry. For example, in (2+1)-dimensional holographic CFTs living on a static spacetime with compact spatial slices, the vacuum energy must be nonpositive, certain averaged energy densities must be nonpositive, and the spectrum of scalar operators is bounded from below by the Ricci scalar of the CFT geometry. Are these results special to holographic CFTs? Here we show that for perturbations about appropriate backgrounds, they are in fact universal to all CFTs, as they follow from the universal behavior of two- and three-point correlators of known operators. In the case of vacuum energy, we extend away from the perturbative regime and make global statements about its negativity properties on the space of spatial geometries. Finally, we comment on the implications for dynamics which are dissipative and driven by such a vacuum energy and we remark on similar results for the behavior of the Euclidean partition function on deformations of flat space or the round sphere.Comment: 35+4 pages, 1 figure. v2: corrected discussion of torus to deformed flat space; additional comments adde

A Bound on Holographic Entanglement Entropy from Inverse Mean Curvature Flow

Entanglement entropies are notoriously difficult to compute. Large-N strongly-coupled holographic CFTs are an important exception, where the AdS/CFT dictionary gives the entanglement entropy of a CFT region in terms of the area of an extremal bulk surface anchored to the AdS boundary. Using this prescription, we show -- for quite general states of (2+1)-dimensional such CFTs -- that the renormalized entanglement entropy of any region of the CFT is bounded from above by a weighted local energy density. The key ingredient in this construction is the inverse mean curvature (IMC) flow, which we suitably generalize to flows of surfaces anchored to the AdS boundary. Our bound can then be thought of as a "subregion" Penrose inequality in asymptotically locally AdS spacetimes, similar to the Penrose inequalities obtained from IMC flows in asymptotically flat spacetimes. Combining the result with positivity of relative entropy, we argue that our bound is valid perturbatively in 1/N, and conjecture that a restricted version of it holds in any CFT.Comment: 33+7 pages, 7 figures. v2: addressed referee comment

Complex Entangling Surfaces for AdS and Lifshitz Black Holes?

We discuss the possible relevance of complex codimension-two extremal surfaces to the the Ryu-Takayanagi holographic entanglement proposal and its covariant Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi (HRT) generalization. Such surfaces live in a complexified bulk spacetime defined by analytic continuation. We identify surfaces of this type for BTZ, Schwarzschild-AdS, and Schwarzschild-Lifshitz planar black holes. Since the dual CFT interpretation for the imaginary part of their areas is unclear, we focus on a straw man proposal relating CFT entropy to the real part of the area alone. For Schwarzschild-AdS and Schwarzschild-Lifshitz, we identify families where the real part of the area agrees with qualitative physical expectations for the appropriate CFT entropy and, in addition, where it is smaller than the area of corresponding real extremal surfaces. It is thus plausible that the CFT entropy is controlled by these complex extremal surfaces.Comment: 28+5 pages. v2: Addressed referee comment