Disrupting Entanglement of Black Holes

Abstract

We study entanglement in thermofield double states of strongly coupled CFTs by analyzing two-sided Reissner-Nordstrom solutions in AdS. The central object of study is the mutual information between a pair of regions, one on each asymptotic boundary of the black hole. For large regions the mutual information is positive and for small ones it vanishes; we compute the critical length scale, which goes to infinity for extremal black holes, of the transition. We also generalize the butterfly effect of Shenker and Stanford to a wide class of charged black holes, showing that mutual information is disrupted upon perturbing the system and waiting for a time of order $\log E/\delta E$ in units of the temperature. We conjecture that the parametric form of this timescale is universal.