Thermal states are vital: Entanglement Wedge Reconstruction from Operator-Pushing

Abstract: We give a general construction of a setup that verifies bulk reconstruction, conservation of relative entropies, and equality of modular flows between the bulk and the boundary, for infinite-dimensional systems with operator-pushing. In our setup, a bulk-to-boundary map is defined at the level of the $C^*$-algebras of state-independent observables. We then show that if the boundary dynamics allow for the existence of a KMS state, physically relevant Hilbert spaces and von Neumann algebras can be constructed directly from our framework. Our construction should be seen as a state-dependent construction of the other side of a wormhole and clarifies the meaning of black hole reconstruction claims such as the Papadodimas-Raju proposal. As an illustration, we apply our result to construct a wormhole based on the HaPPY code, which satisfies all properties of entanglement wedge reconstruction.