The horocycle regulator: exact cutoff-independence in AdS/CFT (2410.00950v2)

Abstract: While the entanglement entropy of a single subregion in quantum field theory is formally infinite and requires regularization, certain combinations of entropies are perfectly finite in the limit that the regulator is removed, the mutual information being a common example. For generic regulator schemes, such as a holographic calculation with a uniform radial cutoff, these quantities show non-trivial dependence on the regulator at finite values of the cutoff. We investigate a holographic regularization scheme defined in three-dimensional anti-de Sitter space constructed from \textit{horocycles}, curves in two-dimensional hyperbolic space perpendicular to all geodesics approaching a single point on the boundary, that leads to finite information measures that are \textit{totally} cutoff-independent, even at finite values of the regulator. We describe a broad class of such information measures, and describe how the field theory dual to the horocycle regulator is inherently non-local.