Tearing down spacetime with quantum disentanglement
If spacetime is holographically built up from the quantum entanglement of microscopic degrees of freedom, it should also be possible to split it apart by disentangling these same degrees of freedom. However, studying this phenomenon with holographic methods reveals a puzzle: the disentangled state appears to keep a large entanglement entropy. I will review this problem and then explain how to resolve it. Interestingly, the solution involves bulk quantum effects of a kind brought to bear on another long-standing enigma in black hole thermodynamics, namely, the entropy of near-extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black holes.