The holographic entanglement entropy for the most general higher derivative gravity is investigated. We find a new type of Wald entropy, which appears on entangling surface without the rotational symmetry and reduces to usual Wald entropy on Killing horizon. Furthermore, we obtain a formal formula of HEE for the most general higher derivative gravity and work it out exactly for some squashed cones. As an important application, we derive HEE for gravitational action with one derivative of the curvature when the extrinsic curvature vanishes. We also study some toy models with non-zero extrinsic curvature. We prove that our formula yields the correct universal term of entanglement entropy for 4d CFTs. Furthermore, we solve the puzzle raised by Hung, Myers and Smolkin that the logarithmic term of entanglement entropy derived from Weyl anomaly of CFTs does not match the holographic result even if the extrinsic curvature vanishes. We find that such mismatch comes from the ‘anomaly of entropy’ of the derivative of curvature. After considering such contributions carefully, we resolve the puzzle successfully. In general, we need to fix the splitting problem for the conical metrics in order to derive the holographic entanglement entropy. We find that, at least for Einstein gravity, the splitting problem can be fixed by using equations of motion. How to derive the splittings for higher derivative gravity is a non-trivial and open question. For simplicity, we ignore the splitting problem in this paper and find that it does not affect our main results.

We applied the transformation optics to mimic a black hole of Schwarzschild form. Similar properties of photon sphere were also found numerically for the metamaterial black hole. Several reduced versions of the black hole systems were proposed for easier implementations.

Recently, a codimension two holography called wedge holography is proposed as a generalization of AdS/CFT. It is conjectured that a gravitational theory in d + 1 dimensional wedge spacetime is dual to a d − 1 dimensional CFT on the corner of the wedge. In this paper, we give an exact construction of the gravitational solutions for wedge holography from the ones in AdS/CFT. By applying this construction, we prove the equivalence between wedge holography and AdS/CFT for vacuum Einstein gravity, by showing that the classical gravitational action and thus the CFT partition function in large N limit are the same for the two theories. The equivalence to AdS/CFT can be regarded as a “proof” of wedge holography in a certain sense. As an application of this powerful equivalence, we derive easily the holographic Weyl anomaly, holographic Entanglement/Rényi entropy and correlation functions for wedge holography. Besides, we discuss the general solutions of wedge holography and argue that they correspond to the AdS/CFT with suitable matter fields. Interestingly, we notice that the intrinsic Ricci scalar on the brane is always a constant, which depends on the tension. Finally, we generalize the discussions to dS/CFT and flat space holography. Remarkably, we find that AdS/CFT, dS/CFT and flat space holography can be unified in the framework of codimension two holography in asymptotically AdS. Different dualities are distinguished by different types of spacetimes on the brane.

We propose a new holographic dual of conformal field theory defined on a manifold with boundaries, i.e., boundary conformal field theory (BCFT). Our proposal can apply to general boundaries and agrees with Takayanagi [ Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 101602 (2011)] for the special case of a disk and half-plane. Using the new proposal of $\mathrm{AdS}/\mathrm{BCFT}$, we successfully obtain the expected boundary Weyl anomaly, and the obtained boundary central charges naturally satisfy a c-like theorem holographically. We also investigate the holographic entanglement entropy of BCFT and find that the minimal surface must be normal to the bulk spacetime boundaries when they intersect. Interestingly, the entanglement entropy depends on the boundary conditions of BCFT and the distance to the boundary. The entanglement wedge has an interesting phase transition that is important for the self-consistency of $\mathrm{AdS}/\mathrm{BCFT}$.