Holographic entanglement entropy: an overview

In this paper, we review recent progress on the holographic understanding of the entanglement entropy in the anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence. In general, the AdS/CFT relates physical observables in strongly coupled quantum many-body systems to certain classical quantities in gravity plus matter theories. In the case of our holographic entanglement entropy, its gravity dual turns out to be purely geometric, i.e. the area of minimal area surfaces in AdS spaces. One interesting application is to study various phase transitions by regarding the entanglement entropy as order parameters. Indeed we will see that our holographic calculations nicely reproduce the confinement/deconfinement transition. Our results can also be applied to understanding the microscopic origins of black hole entropy.