Temporal Entanglement from Holographic Entanglement Entropy

Recently, several notions of entanglement in time have emerged as a novel frontier in quantum many-body physics, quantum field theory, and gravity. We propose a systematic prescription to characterize temporal entanglement in relativistic quantum field theory in a general state for an arbitrary subregion on a flat, constant time slice in a flat spacetime. Our prescription starts with the standard entanglement entropy of a spatial subregion and amounts to transporting the unchanged subregion to boosted time slices all the way across the light cone when it becomes, in general, a complex characterization of the corresponding temporal subregion. For holographic quantum field theories, our prescription amounts to an analytic continuation of all codimension-two bulk extremal surfaces satisfying the homology constraint and picking the one with the smallest real value of the area as the leading saddle point. We implement this prescription for holographic conformal field theories in thermal states on both a two-dimensional Lorentzian cylinder and three-dimensional Minkowski space, and we show that it leads to results with self-consistent physical properties of temporal entanglement.