We develop a renormalization method for holographic entanglement entropy based on area renormalization of entangling surfaces. The renormalized entanglement en-tropy is derived for entangling surfaces in asymptotically locally anti-de Sitter spacetimes in general dimensions and for entangling surfaces in four dimensional holographic renor-malization group flows. The renormalized entanglement entropy for disk regions in AdS 4 spacetimes agrees precisely with the holographically renormalized action for AdS 4 with spherical slicing and hence with the F quantity, in accordance with the Casini-Huerta-Myers map. We present a generic class of holographic RG flows associated with deforma-tions by operators of dimension 3/2 < Δ < 5/2 for which the F quantity increases along the RG flow, hence violating the strong version of the F theorem. We conclude by explaining how the renormalized entanglement entropy can be derived directly from the renormalized partition function using the replica trick i.e. our renormalization method for the entangle-ment entropy is inherited directly from that of the partition function. We show explicitly how the entanglement entropy counterterms can be derived from the standard holographic renormalization counterterms for asymptotically locally anti-de Sitter spacetimes.
We study the universal contributions to the entanglement entropy (EE) of
2+1-dimensional and
3+1-dimensional holographic conformal field theories (CFTs) on topologically nontrivial manifolds, focusing on tori. The holographic bulk corresponds to anti--de Sitter-soliton geometries. We characterize the properties of these regulator-independent EE terms as a function of both the size of the cylindrical entangling region, and the shape of the torus. In
2+1 dimensions, in the simple limit where the torus becomes a thin one-dimensional ring, the EE reduces to a shape-independent constant $2\ensuremath{\gamma}$. This is twice the EE obtained by bipartitioning an infinite cylinder into equal halves. We study the renormalization group flow of $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ by defining a renormalized EE that (1) is applicable to general QFTs, (2) resolves the failure of the area law subtraction, and (3) is inspired by the F-theorem. We find that the renormalized $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ decreases monotonically at small coupling when the holographic CFT is deformed by a relevant operator for all allowed scaling dimensions. We also discuss the question of nonuniqueness of such renormalized EEs both in
2+1 dimensions and
3+1 dimensions.
Abstract In this paper we continue the study of renormalized entanglement entropy introduced in [1]. In particular, we investigate its behavior near an IR fixed point using holographic duality. We develop techniques which, for any static holographic geometry, enable us to extract the large radius expansion of the entanglement entropy for a spherical region. We show that for both a sphere and a strip, the approach of the renormalized entanglement entropy to the IR fixed point value contains a contribution that depends on the whole RG trajectory. Such a contribution is dominant, when the leading irrelevant operator is sufficiently irrelevant. For a spherical region such terms can be anticipated from a geometric expansion, while for a strip whether these terms have geometric origins remains to be seen.