Abstract We investigate how entanglement entropy behaves in a non-conformal scalar field system with a quantum phase transition, by the replica method. We study the σ-model in 3+1 dimensions which is O(N) symmetric as the mass squared parameter μ2 is positive, and undergoes spontaneous symmetry breaking while μ2 becomes negative. The area law leading divergence of the entanglement entropy is preserved in both of the symmetric and the broken phases. The spontaneous symmetry breaking changes the subleading divergence from log to log squared, due to the cubic interaction on the cone. At the leading order of the coupling constant expansion, the entanglement entropy reaches a cusped maximum at the quantum phase transition point μ2 = 0, and decreases while μ2 is tuned away from 0 into either phase.
Understanding the dependence of entanglement entropy on the renormalized mass in quantum field theories can provide insight into phenomena such as quantum phase transitions, since the mass varies in a singular way near the transition. Here we perturbatively calculate the entanglement entropy in interacting scalar field theory, focusing on the dependence on the field’s mass. We study λϕ 4 and g ϕ 3 theories in their ground state. By tracing over a half space, using the replica trick and position space Green’s functions on the cone, we show that spacetime volume divergences cancel and renormalization can be consistently performed in this conical geometry. We establish finite contributions to the entanglement entropy up to two-loop order, involving a finite area law. The resulting entropy is simple and intuitive: the free theory result in d = 3 (that we included in an earlier publication) Δ S ∼ A m 2 ln ( m 2 ) is altered, to leading order, by replacing the bare mass m by the renormalized mass m r evaluated at the renormalization scale of zero momentum.
Entanglement is a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics and plays an important role in characterizing many-body systems and quantum phase transitions. A quantitative measure of quantum correlations between subsystems is entanglement entropy. In this thesis, we study the entanglement entropy of an interacting quantum field theory, the O(N) model. In local quantum field theories, the leading-order contribution in the scaling of entanglement entropy obeys an area law. This dominant term is governed by short-distance physics near the entangling surface and depends on the ultraviolet regularization, making it non-universal. Beyond this lead- ing scaling behavior, entanglement entropy can contain subleading universal contributions, which encode intrinsic information about the underlying quantum field theory. In this thesis, we calculate one such universal term: the correlation length coefficient r, which appears as a correction to the entanglement entropy evaluated slightly away from the quantum critical point. The analysis is carried out in D = 2 + 1 spacetime dimensions for an infinite cylindrical geometry. We study the model in the vicinity of criticality using the large-N expansion, which enables controlled analytical calculations. Our main result is that the coefficient r scales linearly with the number of field components N . This behavior is consistent with the interpretation of r as a universal quantity associated with the degrees of freedom of the theory. The calculation is based on the replica method and renormalization group arguments, which are presented in detail. Finally, we discuss the physical meaning of the result and possible methods for verifying it, and we review related results for the O(N) model in different geometries.
It is generally believed that in spatial dimension
d>1, the leading contribution to the entanglement entropy $S=\ensuremath{-}\text{tr}\text{ }{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{A}\text{ }\text{log}\text{ }{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{A}$ scales as the area of the boundary of subsystem
A. The coefficient of this ``area law'' is nonuniversal. However, in the neighborhood of a quantum critical point
S is believed to possess subleading universal corrections. In the present work, we study the entanglement entropy in the quantum
O(N) model in
1<d<3. We use an expansion in $ϵ=3\ensuremath{-}d$ to evaluate (i) the universal geometric correction to
S for an infinite cylinder divided along a circular boundary; (ii) the universal correction to
S due to a finite correlation length. Both corrections are different at the Wilson-Fisher and Gaussian fixed points, and the $ϵ\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$ limit of the Wilson-Fisher fixed point is distinct from the Gaussian fixed point. In addition, we compute the correlation length correction to the Renyi entropy ${S}_{n}=\frac{1}{1\ensuremath{-}n}\text{log}\text{ }\text{tr}\text{ }{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{A}^{n}$ in
ϵ and large-
N expansions. For $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$, this correction generally scales as
N2 rather than the naively expected
N. Moreover, the Renyi entropy has a phase transition as a function of
n for
d close to 3.
We investigate the scaling of the bipartite entanglement entropy across Lifshitz quantum phase transitions, where the topology of the Fermi surface changes without any changes in symmetry. We present both numerical and analytical results which show that Lifshitz transitions are characterized by a well-defined set of critical exponents for the entanglement entropy near the phase transition. In one dimension, we show that the entanglement entropy exhibits a length scale that diverges as the system approaches a Lifshitz critical point. In two dimensions, the leading and subleading coefficients of the scaling of entanglement entropy show distinct power-law singularities at critical points. The effect of weak interactions is investigated using the density matrix renormalization group algorithm.
The entanglement entropy of a subsystem
A of a quantum system is expressed, in the replica method, through analytic continuation with respect to n of the trace of the n-th power of the reduced density matrix $\trρ_A^n$. We study the analytic properties of this quantity as a function of n in some quantum critical Ising-like models in 1+1 and 2+1 dimensions. Although we find no true singularities for n>0, there is a threshold value of n close to 2 which separates two very different `phases'. The region with larger n is characterized by rapidly convergent Taylor expansions and is very smooth. The region with smaller n has a very rich and varied structure in the complex n plane and is characterized by Taylor coefficients which instead of being monotone decreasing, have a maximum growing with the size of the subsystem. Finite truncations of the Taylor expansion in this region lead to increasingly poor approximations of $\trρ_A^n$. The computation of the entanglement entropy from the knowledge of $\trρ^n_A$ for positive integer n becomes extremely difficult particularly in spatial dimensions larger than one, where one cannot use conformal field theory as a guidance in the extrapolations to n=1.
We study the entanglement transition in monitored Brownian SYK chains in the large-
N limit. Without measurement the steady state
n-th Rényi entropy is obtained by summing over a class of solutions, and is found to saturate to the Page value in the
n→1 limit. In the presence of measurements, the analytical continuation
n→1 is performed using the cyclic symmetric solution. The result shows that as the monitoring rate increases, a continuous von Neumann entanglement entropy transition from volume-law to area-law occurs at the point of replica symmetry unbreaking.