Holographic Schwinger Effect and the Geometry of Entanglement

Abstract

We show that the recently proposed bulk dual of an entangled pair of a quark and an antiquark corresponds to the Lorentzian continuation of the tunneling instanton describing Schwinger pair creation in the dual field theory. This observation supports and further explains the claim by Jensen and Karch that the bulk dual of an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pair is a string with a wormhole on its world sheet. We suggest that this constitutes a holographically dual realization of the creation of a Wheeler wormhole.