A Toy Model of Entwinement

Abstract

Entwinement is the entanglement entropy of a subset of gauge-variant degrees of freedom in a certain twisted state of an orbifold CFT, defined by embedding the state in a larger Hilbert space with some gauge constraints removed. We propose an intrinsically gauge-invariant, algebraic definition of entwinement. Our main piece of evidence is a computation showing that, in a spin system that resembles the orbifold CFT, the analog of entwinement is the entanglement entropy of a gauge-invariant subalgebra, which we identify. We review why entwinement is relevant for the conjecture that entanglement builds spacetime.