Bulk locality and entanglement swapping in AdS/CFT

Abstract Localized bulk excitations in AdS/CFT are produced by operators which modify the pattern of entanglement in the boundary state. We show that simple models — consisting of entanglement swapping operators acting on a qubit system or a free field theory — capture qualitative features of gravitational backreaction and reproduce predictions of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula. These entanglement swapping operators naturally admit multiple representations associated with different degrees of freedom, thereby reproducing the code subspace structure emphasized by Almheiri, Dong, and Harlow. We also show that the boundary Reeh-Schlieder theorem implies that equivalence of certain operators on a code subspace necessarily breaks down when non-perturbative effects are taken into account (as is expected based on bulk arguments)