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arXiv:1210.5655 · Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields

Density of states in a free CFT and finite volume corrections

Connor Behan

Published Jul 22, 2013• 5 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Results from spectral geometry such as Weyl's formula can be used to relate the thermodynamic properties of a free massless field to the spatial manifold on which it is defined. We begin by calculating the free energy in two cases: manifolds posessing a boundary and spheres. The subextensive contributions allow us to test the Cardy-Verlinde formula and offer a new perspective on why it only holds in a free theory if one allows for a change in the overall coefficient. After this we derive an expression for the density of states that takes the form of a Taylor series. This series leads to an improvement over known results when the area of the manifold's boundary is nonzero but much less than the appropriate power of its volume.

DOI
10.1103/physrevd.88.026015

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Results from spectral geometry such as Weyl's formula can be used to relate the thermodynamic properties of a free massless field to the spatial manifold on which it is defined. We begin by calculating the free energy in two cases: manifolds posessing a boundary and spheres. The subextensive contributions allow us to test the Cardy-Verlinde formula and offer a new perspective on why it only holds in a free theory if one allows for a change in the overall coefficient. After this we derive an expression for the density of states that takes the form of a Taylor series. This series leads to an improvement over known results when the area of the manifold's boundary is nonzero but much less than the appropriate power of its volume.
A large class of conformal field theories can be studied by setting the mass to zero in a set of non-interacting fields that form a representation of the Lorentz group. We consider all such field theories defined on a general compact manifold. In the large volume limit, the density of states as a function of energy is shown to obey the same differential equation regardless of the manifold's geometry. From this equation, we compute the leading and next-to-leading behaviour for the density of states, and establish a method that can be iterated to obtain the asymptotic series to any desired precision.
A bstract We give a rigorous proof that in any free quantum field theory with a finite group global symmetry G, on a compact spatial manifold, at sufficiently high energy, the density of states ρ α ( E ) for each irreducible representation α of G obeys a universal formula as conjectured by Harlow and Ooguri. We further prove that this continues to hold in a weakly coupled quantum field theory, given an appropriate scaling of the coupling with temperature. This generalizes similar results that were previously obtained in (1 + 1)-D to higher spacetime dimension. We discuss the role of averaging in the density of states, and we compare and contrast with the case of continuous group G, where we prove a universal, albeit different, behavior.
We study whether the relations between the Weyl anomaly, entanglement entropy (EE), and thermal entropy of a two-dimensional (2D) conformal field theory (CFT) extend to 2D boundaries of 3D CFTs, or 2D defects of D≥3 CFTs. The Weyl anomaly of a 2D boundary or defect defines two or three central charges, respectively. One of these, b, obeys a c theorem, as in 2D CFT. For a 2D defect, we show that another, d_{2}, interpreted as the defect's "conformal dimension," must be non-negative if the averaged null energy condition holds in the presence of the defect. We show that the EE of a sphere centered on a planar defect has a logarithmic contribution from the defect fixed by b and d_{2}. Using this and known holographic results, we compute b and d_{2} for 1/2-Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield surface operators in the maximally supersymmetric (SUSY) 4D and 6D CFTs. The results are consistent with b's c theorem. Via free field and holographic examples we show that no universal "Cardy formula" relates the central charges to thermal entropy.
We rigorously derive explicit formulae for the pair correlation function of the ground state of the free Fermi gas in the thermodynamic limit for general geometries of the macroscopic regions occupied by the particles and arbitrary dimension. As a consequence we also establish the asymptotic validity of the local density approximation for the corresponding exchange energy. At constant density these formulae are universal and do not depend on the geometry of the underlying macroscopic domain. In order to identify the correlation effects in the thermodynamic limit, we prove a local Weyl law for the spectral asymptotics of the Laplacian for certain quantum observables which are themselves dependent on a small parameter under very general boundary conditions.
Universal thermal data in conformal field theory (CFT) offer a valuable means for characterizing and classifying criticality. With improved tensor network techniques, we investigate the universal thermodynamics on a nonorientable minimal surface, the crosscapped disk (or real projective plane, RP2{\mathbb{RP}}^{2}RP2). Through a cut-and-sew process, RP2{\mathbb{RP}}^{2}RP2 is topologically equivalent to a cylinder with rainbow and crosscap boundaries. We uncover that the crosscap contributes a fractional topological term 12lnk\frac{1}{2}lnk21​lnk related to a nonorientable genus, with kkk a universal constant in two-dimensional CFT, while the rainbow boundary gives rise to a geometric term $\frac{c}{4}ln\ensuremath{\beta}$, with $\ensuremath{\beta}$ the manifold size and ccc the central charge. We have also obtained analytically the logarithmic rainbow term by CFT calculations, and discuss its connection to the renowned Cardy-Peschel conical singularity.
Abstract I first calculate the charged spherical Rényi entropy by a numerical method that does not require knowledge of any eigenvalue degeneracies, and applies to all odd dimensions. An image method is used to relate the full sphere values to those for an integer covering, n . It is shown to be equivalent to a ‘transformation’ property of the zeta-function. The n → ∞ limit is explicitly constructed analytically and a relation deduced between the limits of corner coefficients and the effective action (free energy) which generalises, for free fields, a result of Bueno, Myers and Witczak-Krempa and Elvang and Hadjiantonis to any dimension. Finally, the known polynomial expressions for the Rényi entropy on even spheres at zero chemical potential are re–derived in a different form and a simple formula for the conformal anomaly given purely in terms of central factorials is obtained.