In literature on the holographic duality, recently a new way of looking at the Ryu-Takayanagi formula has been presented, where the minimal surface area has been replaced by the maximum number of "bit-threads" that can emanate from a boundary region.
If the entanglement entropy of the boundary region $A$ is $S(A)$, then the new paper says there will be $S(A)$ bit-threads emanating from the region and ending on the rest of the boundary. Each bit-thread carries one qubit of information.
So if we think of a bit-thread as a noiseless qubit channel, we have that $S(A)$ uses of the noiseless qubit channel are needed to carry information between the boundary region $A$ and the rest of the boundary. This, being essentially the statement of Schumacher's quantum data compression theorem, made me wonder: if for some reason we only had noisy qubit channels, in which case we know that we need more than $S(A)$ uses to carry information on the state of $A$ to the rest of the boundary, what effect on the metric of space would there be?
To summarize: Can we think of these bit-threads as noiseless qubit channels traversing the bulk? If so, what effect is there on the metric of space if these channels became noisy?
