Boundary duals of bulk detectors
hep-th, quant-ph
Submitted: 2026-09-14
Updated: 2026-09-23
Comments: 59 pages + appendices, 9 figures. v2: Added a citation
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: What is the boundary dual of an Unruh-DeWitt detector in anti-de Sitter space? We argue that this question is naturally answered by the HKLL reconstruction program.
Terminology
Abstract
What is the boundary dual of an Unruh-DeWitt detector in anti-de Sitter space? We argue that this question is naturally answered by the HKLL reconstruction program. A local detector in the bulk can be associated with a smeared detector in the boundary, where the choice of smearing depends on the choice of HKLL kernel. We use this formalism to analyze entanglement harvesting in the Poincaré patch of AdS 3 for a bulk Unruh-DeWitt detector paired either with a boundary detector or with a second bulk detector. We compute the amount of harvesting in the standard way, namely by evaluating the two-detector density matrix to quadratic order in the coupling λ. Additionally, we address an apparent tension between microcausality for spacelike-separated bulk detectors and the fact that the dual HKLL detectors may directly overlap in the boundary theory.
Sources
- Observer dependent entanglement
- Harvesting correlations from the quantum vacuum
- Building up spacetime with quantum entanglement
- Entanglement harvesting in conformal field theory
- Probing holographic conformal field theories
- Entangling detectors in anti-de Sitter space
- Unruh-DeWitt detectors and entanglement: the anti-de Sitter space
- Unruh-DeWitt detector in $\textrm{AdS}_2$
- Analytic Tools for Harvesting Magic Resource in Curved Spacetime
- General Relativistic Quantum Optics: Finite-size particle detector models in curved spacetimes
- Relativistic Quantum Optics: On the relativistic invariance of the light-matter interaction models
- TASI Lectures on the Emergence of the Bulk in AdS/CFT
- Lectures on Bulk Reconstruction
- Reconstruction of Bulk Operators within the Entanglement Wedge in Gauge-Gravity Duality
- Operator Dictionaries and Wave Functions in AdS/CFT and dS/CFT
- Boundary-to-bulk maps for AdS causal wedges and the Reeh-Schlieder property in holography
- Construction of Bulk Fields with Gauge Redundancy
- Bulk and Transhorizon Measurements in AdS/CFT
- Constructing local bulk observables in interacting AdS/CFT
- CFT representation of interacting bulk gauge fields in AdS
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