Islands and entanglement entropy in $d$-dimensional curved backgrounds

Abstract

A large part of the discussion on entanglement islands has explored the specific setup of $2d$ JT gravity with a flat heatbath coupled to a $2d$ CFT. In this paper, we consider a more general setup and treatment of islands in a $d-$dimensional AdS black hole background. The quantum fields modeling the Hawking radiation have a scale and are consistently inherited from a conformal parent theory; their symmetries are thus compatible with those of curved backgrounds. We demonstrate explicitly that the existence of islands is sensitive to the choice of CFT used to model the Hawking radiation. We compute the renormalised entanglement entropy of conformal fields on a negatively curved background in $d$ dimensions at zero temperature as well as the thermal regulated entropy of an entangling region near the UV boundary. Using the latter quantity as the entropy of the Hawking radiation, we find that islands never emerge for $d>2$.