Pure states for subregions in gravity and their entanglement entropy

Abstract

It is proposed that spatial subregions in quantum gravity can be assigned pure states, rather than mixed reduced density matrices. The state is prepared by a partially frozen gravitational path integral, in which a spacetime subregion containing the spatial subregion is fixed while the field configurations and ambient geometry are summed over. In the semiclassical regime, we further propose a holographic prescription for the entanglement entropy of bipartitions of this state, with a frozen-region analogue of the homology constraint. The prescription satisfies nontrivial self-consistency conditions, including strong subadditivity, complementarity, and entanglement wedge nesting, and reproduces several known entropy formulas in holography and gravity as special cases. The construction suggests an observer-dependent entanglement wedge labeled by the frozen subregion.