Black holes entangled by radiation

Abstract We construct three models to describe the scenario where two eternal black holes are separated by a flat space, and can eventually be entangled by exchanging radiation. In the doubly holographic setup, we compute the entanglement entropy and mutual information among subsystems and obtain the dynamic phase structure of the entanglement. The formation of entanglement between these two black holes is delayed by the space which the radiation must travel through. If the black holes exchange sufficient Hawking modes, the final state is characterized by a connected entanglement wedge; otherwise, the final entanglement wedge contains two separate islands. In the former case, the entanglement wedge of the black holes forms at the time scale proportional to the size of the flat space between them. While in both cases, the unitarity of the evolution is preserved. When the sizes of the black holes are not equal, we observe a loss of entanglement between the smaller black hole and the radiation at late times. On the field theory side, we consider two Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) clusters coupled to a Majorana chain, which resemble two black holes connected by a radiation region. We numerically compute the same entanglement measures and obtain similar phase structures as the bulk results. In general, a time delay of the entanglement between the SYK clusters is found in cases with a long Majorana chain. In particular, when the SYK clusters are different in size, similar entanglement loss between the smaller SYK cluster and the Majorana chain is observed. Finally, we investigate a chain model composed of EPR clusters with particles exchanging between neighboring clusters and reproduce the features of entanglement observed in the previous models.