When enough matter is condensed in a small region, gravitational effects will be strong enough to cause collapse and a black hole will be formed. We formulate and prove here such a statement in the language of general relativity. (This is Theorem 2 of this paper.)

BMS symmetry, which is the asymptotic symmetry at null infinity of flat spacetime, is an important input for flat holography. In this paper, we give a holographic calculation of entanglement entropy and Rényi entropy in three dimensional Einstein gravity and Topologically Massive Gravity. The geometric picture for the entanglement entropy is the length of a spacelike geodesic which is connected to the interval at null infinity by two null geodesics. The spacelike geodesic is the fixed points of replica symmetry, and the null geodesics are along the modular flow. Our strategy is to first reformulate the Rindler method for calculating entanglement entropy in a general setup, and apply it for BMS invariant field theories, and finally extend the calculation to the bulk.

The Entanglement contour function quantifies the contribution from each degree of freedom in a region $\mathcal{A}$ to the entanglement entropy $S_{\mathcal{A}}$. Recently in \cite{Wen:2018whg} the author gave two proposals for the entanglement contour in two-dimensional theories. The first proposal is a fine structure analysis of the entanglement wedge, which applies to holographic theories. The second proposal is a claim that for general two-dimensional theories the partial entanglement entropy is given by a linear combination of entanglement entropies of relevant subsets inside $\mathcal{A}$. In this paper, we further study the partial entanglement entropy proposal by showing that it satisfies all the rational requirements proposed previously. We also extend the fine structure analysis from vacuum AdS space to BTZ black holes. Furthermore, we give a simple prescription to generate the local modular flows for two-dimensional theories from only the entanglement entropies without refer to the explicit Rindler transformations.

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We explore the fine structure of the holographic entanglement entropy proposal (the Ryu-Takayanagi formula) in AdS$_3$/CFT$_{2}$. With the guidance from the boundary and bulk modular flows we find a natural slicing of the entanglement wedge with the modular planes, which are co-dimension one bulk surfaces tangent to the modular flow everywhere. This gives an one-to-one correspondence between the points on the boundary interval $\mathcal{A}$ and the points on the Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) surface $\mathcal{E}_{\mathcal{A}}$. In the same sense an arbitrary subinterval $\mathcal{A}_2$ of $\mathcal{A}$ will correspond to a subinterval $\mathcal{E}_2$ of $\mathcal{E}_{\mathcal{A}}$. This fine correspondence indicates that the length of $\mathcal{E}_2$ captures the contribution $s_{\mathcal{A}}(\mathcal{A}_2)$ from $\mathcal{A}_2$ to the entanglement entropy $S_{\mathcal{A}}$, hence gives the contour function for entanglement entropy. Furthermore we propose that $s_{\mathcal{A}}(\mathcal{A}_2)$ in general can be written as a simple linear combination of entanglement entropies of single intervals inside $\mathcal{A}$. This proposal passes several non-trivial tests.

Various aspects of warped conformal field theories (WCFTs) are studied including entanglement entropy on excited states, the Renyi entropy after a local quench, and out-of-time-order four-point functions. Assuming a large central charge and dominance of the vacuum block in the conformal block expansion, (i) we calculate the single-interval entanglement entropy on an excited state, matching previous finite temperature results by changing the ensemble; and (ii) we show that WCFTs are maximally chaotic, a result that is compatible with the existence of black holes in the holographic duals. Finally, we relax the aforementioned assumptions and study the time evolution of the Renyi entropy after a local quench. We find that the change in the Renyi entropy is topological, vanishing at early and late times, and nonvanishing in between only for charged states in spectrally-flowed WCFTs.

We study a toy model of the Kerr/CFT correspondence using string theory on AdS_3 × S^3. We propose a single trace irrelevant deformation of the dual CFT generated by a vertex operator with spacetime dimensions (2,1). This operator shares the same quantum numbers as the integrable T\bar{J} deformation of two-dimensional CFTs where \bar{J} is a chiral U(1) current. We show that the deformation is marginal on the worldsheet and that the target spacetime is deformed to null warped AdS_3 upon dimensional reduction. We also calculate the spectrum of the deformed theory on the cylinder and compare it to the field theory analysis of T\bar{J}-deformed CFTs.

We use modular invariance to derive constraints on the spectrum of warped conformal field theories (WCFTs) --- nonrelativistic quantum field theories described by a chiral Virasoro and U(1) Kac-Moody algebra. We focus on holographic WCFTs and interpret our results in the simplest holographic set up: three dimensional gravity with Compere-Song-Strominger boundary conditions. Holographic WCFTs feature a negative U(1) level that is responsible for negative norm descendant states. Despite the violation of unitarity we show that the modular bootstrap is still viable provided the (Virasoro-Kac-Moody) primaries carry positive norm. In particular, we show that holographic WCFTs must feature either primary states with negative norm or states with imaginary U(1) charge, the latter of which have a natural holographic interpretation. For large central charge and arbitrary level, we show that the first excited primary state in any WCFT satisfies the Hellerman bound. Moreover, when the level is positive we point out that known bounds for CFTs with internal U(1) symmetries readily apply to unitary WCFTs.

To understand the new physics and richness of quantum many-body system phenomena is one of the stimuli driving the condensed matter community forward. Importantly, the new insights and solutions for condensed matter theory sometimes come from the developed and developing knowledge of high energy theory, mathematical and particle physics, which is also true the other way around: Condensed matter physics has been providing crucial hints and playgrounds for the fundamental laws of high energy physics. In this thesis, we explore the aspects of symmetry, topology and anomalies in quantum matter with entanglement from both condensed matter and high energy theory viewpoints. The focus of our research is on the gapped many-body quantum systems including symmetry-protected topological states (SPTs) and topologically ordered states (TOs). We first explore the ground state structures of SPTs and TOs: the former can be symmetry twisted and the latter has robust degeneracy. The Berry phases generated by transporting and overlapping ground state sectors potentially provide universal topological invariants that fully characterize the SPTs and TOs. This framework provides us the aspects of symmetry and topology. We establish a field theory representation of SPT invariants in any dimension to uncover group cohomology classification and beyond — the former for SPTs with gapless boundary gauge anomalies, the latter for SPTs with mixed gauge-gravity anomalies. We study topological orders in 3+1 dimensions such as Dijkgraaf-Witten models, which support multi-string braiding statistics; the resulting patterns may be analyzed by the mathematical theory of knots and links. We explore the aspects of surface anomalies of bulk gapped states from the bulk-edge correspondence: The gauge anomalies of SPTs shed light on the construction of bosonic anomalies including Goldstone-Wilczek type, and also guide us to design a non-perturbative lattice model regularizing the low-energy chiral fermion/gauge theory towards the Standard Model while overcoming the Nielsen-Ninomiya fermion-doubling problem without relying on Ginsparg-Wilson fermions. We conclude by utilizing aspects of both quantum mechanical topology and spacetime topology to derive new formulas analogous to Verlinde’s via geometric-topology surgery. This provides new insights for higher dimensional topological states of matter.

We hypothesize a new and more complete set of anomalies of certain quantum field theories (QFTs) and then give an eclectic proof. First, we propose a set of 't Hooft anomalies of 2d $\mathbb{CP}^{\mathrm{N}-1}$-sigma models at $\theta=\pi$, with N $=2,3,4$ and others, by enlisting all possible 3d cobordism invariants and selecting the matched terms. Second, we propose a set of 't Hooft higher anomalies of 4d time-reversal symmetric SU(N)-Yang-Mills (YM) gauge theory at $\theta=\pi$, via 5d cobordism invariants (higher symmetry-protected topological states) such that compactifying YM theory on a 2-torus matches the constrained 3d cobordism invariants from sigma models. Based on algebraic/geometric topology, QFT analysis, manifold generator dimensional reduction, condensed matter inputs and additional physics criteria, we derive a correspondence between 5d and 3d new invariants, thus broadly prove a more complete anomaly-matching between 4d YM and 2d $\mathbb{CP}^{\mathrm{N}-1}$ models via a twisted 2-torus reduction, done by taking the Poincar\'e dual of specific cohomology class with $\mathbb{Z}_2$ coefficients. We formulate a higher-symmetry analog of "Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem" to constrain the low-energy dynamics.