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Purification is a powerful technique in quantum physics whereby a mixed quantum state is extended to a pure state on a larger system. This process is not unique, and in systems composed of many degrees of freedom, one natural purification is the one with minimal entanglement. Here we study the entropy of the minimally entangled purification, called the entanglement of purification, in three model systems: an Ising spin chain, conformal field theories holographically dual to Einstein gravity, and random stabilizer tensor networks. We conjecture values for the entanglement of purification in all these models, and we support our conjectures with a variety of numerical and analytical results. We find that such minimally entangled purifications have a number of applications, from enhancing entanglement-based tensor network methods for describing mixed states to elucidating novel aspects of the emergence of geometry from entanglement in the AdS/CFT correspondence., 40 pages, multiple figures. v2: references added, typos corrected

The previously proposed "Complexity=Volume" or CV-duality is probed and developed in several directions. We show that the apparent lack of universality for large and small black holes is removed if the volume is measured in units of the maximal time from the horizon to the "final slice" (times Planck area). This also works for spinning black holes. We make use of the conserved "volume current", associated with a foliation of spacetime by maximal volume surfaces, whose flux measures their volume. This flux picture suggests that there is a transfer of the complexity from the UV to the IR in holographic CFTs, which is reminiscent of thermalization behavior deduced using holography. It also naturally gives a second law for the complexity when applied at a black hole horizon. We further establish a result supporting the conjecture that a boundary foliation determines a bulk maximal foliation without gaps, establish a global inequality on maximal volumes that can be used to deduce the monotonicity of the complexification rate on a boost-invariant background, and probe CV duality in the settings of multiple quenches, spinning black holes, and Rindler-AdS., 39 pages, many figures; v2: minor edits, references added

In this paper, we study the physical significance of the thermodynamic volumes of AdS black holes using the Noether charge formalism of Iyer and Wald. After applying this formalism to study the extended thermodynamics of a few examples, we discuss how the extended thermodynamics interacts with the recent complexity = action proposal of Brown et al. (CA-duality). We, in particular, discover that their proposal for the late time rate of change of complexity has a nice decomposition in terms of thermodynamic quantities reminiscent of the Smarr relation. This decomposition strongly suggests a geometric, and via CA-duality holographic, interpretation for the thermodynamic volume of an AdS black hole. We go on to discuss the role of thermodynamics in complexity = action for a number of black hole solutions, and then point out the possibility of an alternate proposal, which we dub "complexity = volume 2.0". In this alternate proposal, the complexity would be thought of as the spacetime volume of the Wheeler-DeWitt patch. Finally, we provide evidence that, in certain cases, our proposal for complexity is consistent with the Lloyd bound whereas CA-duality is not., v4: Changed to match published version

We use the Iyer-Wald formalism to derive an extended first law of entanglement that includes variations in the cosmological constant, Newton's constant and --in the case of higher-derivative theories-- all the additional couplings of the theory. In Einstein gravity, where the number of degrees of freedom $N^2$ of the dual field theory is a function of $\Lambda$ and $G$, our approach allows us to vary $N$ keeping the field theory scale fixed or to vary the field theory scale keeping $N$ fixed. We also derive an extended first law of entanglement for Gauss-Bonnet and Lovelock gravity and show that in these cases all the extra variations reorganize nicely in terms of the central charges of the theory. Finally, we comment on the implications for renormalization group flows and c-theorems in higher dimensions., Comment: 38 pages, typos corrected, version published in Phys. Rev. D

We study the extended thermodynamics, obtained by considering the cosmological constant as a thermodynamic variable, of STU black holes in 4-dimensions in the fixed charge ensemble. The associated phase structure is conjectured to be dual to an RG-flow on the space of field theories. We find that for some charge configurations the phase structure resembles that of a Van der Waals gas: the system exhibits a family of first order phase transitions ending in a second order phase transition at a critical temperature. We calculate the holographic entanglement entropy for several charge configurations and show that for the cases where the gravity background exhibits Van der Waals behavior, the entanglement entropy presents a transition at the same critical temperature. To further characterize the phase transition we calculate appropriate critical exponents and show that they coincide. Thus, the entanglement entropy successfully captures the information of the extended phase structure. Finally, we discuss the physical interpretation of the extended space in terms of the boundary QFT and construct various holographic heat engines dual to STU black holes., 35 pages, multiple figures. v3: matches published version

Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, we construct the holographic dual of a tunneling instanton describing Schwinger pair creation in de Sitter space. Our approach allows us to extract the critical value of the electric field for which the potential barrier disappears, rendering the vacuum unstable. In addition, we compute the large-$\lambda$, large-$N_c$ corrections to the nucleation rate and we find that it agrees with previous expectations based on perturbative computations. As a by-product of this investigation, we study the causal structure of the string dual to the nucleated pair as seen by different static observers and we show that it can be interpreted as a dynamical creation of a `gluonic' wormhole. We explain how this result provides further evidence for the ER=EPR conjecture as an equivalence between two descriptions of the same physical phenomenon., Comment: 23 pages, multiple figures. v2: minor clarifications and references added

In this paper we study some thermal properties of quantum field theories in de Sitter space by means of holographic techniques. We focus on the static patch of de Sitter and assume that the quantum fields are in the standard Bunch-Davies vacuum. More specifically, we follow the stochastic motion of a massive charged particle due to its interaction with Hawking radiation. The process is described in terms of the theory of Brownian motion in inhomogeneous media and its associated Langevin dynamics. At late times, we find that the particle undergoes a regime of slow diffusion and never reaches the horizon, in stark contrast to the usual random walk behavior at finite temperature. Nevertheless, the fluctuation-dissipation theorem is found to hold at all times., Comment: 1+45 pages, 5 figures. v4: matches published version

The Anti-de Sitter-Reissner-Nordstrom (AdS-RN) black hole in the canonical ensemble undergoes a phase transition similar to the liquid-gas phase transition, i.e. the isocharges on the entropy-temperature plane develop an unstable branch when the charge is smaller than a critical value. It was later discovered that the isocharges on the entanglement entropy-temperature plane also exhibit the same van der Waals-like structure, for spherical entangling regions. In this paper, we present numerical results which sharpen this similarity between entanglement entropy and black hole entropy, by showing that both of these entropies obey Maxwell's equal area law to an accuracy of around 1 %. Moreover, we checked this for a wide range of size of the spherical entangling region, and the equal area law holds independently of the size. We also checked the equal area law for AdS-RN in 4 and 5 dimensions, so the conclusion is not specific to a particular dimension. Finally, we repeated the same procedure for a similar, van der Waals-like transition of the dyonic black hole in AdS in a mixed ensemble (fixed electric potential and fixed magnetic charge), and showed that the equal area law is not valid in this case. Thus the equal area law for entanglement entropy seems to be specific to the AdS-RN background., Comment: 17 pages, multiple figures. v4: matches published version