Holographic derivation of entanglement entropy from the anti-de sitter space/conformal field theory correspondence

A holographic derivation of the entanglement entropy in quantum (conformal) field theories is proposed from anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence. We argue that the entanglement entropy in d+1 dimensional conformal field theories can be obtained from the area of d dimensional minimal surfaces in AdSd+2, analogous to the Bekenstein-Hawking formula for black hole entropy. We show that our proposal agrees perfectly with the entanglement entropy in 2D CFT when applied to AdS3. We also compare the entropy computed in AdS5×S5 with that of the free N=4 super Yang-Mills theory.