On the Architecture of Spacetime Geometry

Abstract

We propose entanglement entropy as a probe of the architecture of spacetime in quantum gravity. We argue that the leading contribution to this entropy satisfies an area law for any sufficiently large region in a smooth spacetime, which, in fact, is given by the Bekenstein-Hawking formula. This conjecture is supported by various lines of evidence from perturbative quantum gravity, simplified models of induced gravity and loop quantum gravity, as well as the AdS/CFT correspondence.