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arXiv:1509.04288 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Anomalies and entanglement entropy

Tatsuma Nishioka, Amos Yarom

Published Mar 1, 2016• 21 citations
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Abstract

We initiate a systematic study of entanglement and Rényi entropies in the presence of gauge and gravitational anomalies in even-dimensional quantum field theories. We argue that the mixed and gravitational anomalies are sensitive to boosts and obtain a closed form expression for their behavior under such transformations. Explicit constructions exhibiting the dependence of entanglement entropy on boosts is provided for theories on spacetimes with non-trivial magnetic fluxes and (or) non-vanishing Pontryagin classes.

DOI
10.1007/jhep03(2016)077

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We initiate a systematic study of entanglement and Rényi entropies in the presence of gauge and gravitational anomalies in even-dimensional quantum field theories. We argue that the mixed and gravitational anomalies are sensitive to boosts and obtain a closed form expression for their behavior under such transformations. Explicit constructions exhibiting the dependence of entanglement entropy on boosts is provided for theories on spacetimes with non-trivial magnetic fluxes and (or) non-vanishing Pontryagin classes.
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Entanglement entropy in even-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) contains well-known universal terms arising from the conformal anomaly. R\'enyi entropies are natural generalizations of the entanglement entropy that are much less understood. Above two spacetime dimensions, the universal terms in the R\'enyi entropies are unknown for general entangling geometries. We conjecture a new structure in the dependence of the four-dimensional R\'enyi entropies on the intrinsic and extrinsic geometry of the entangling surface. We provide evidence for this conjecture by direct numerical computations in the free scalar and fermion field theories. The computation involves relating the four-dimensional free massless R\'enyi entropies across cylindrical entangling surfaces to corresponding three-dimensional massive R\'enyi entropies across circular entangling surfaces. Our numerical technique also allows us to directly probe other interesting aspects of three-dimensional R\'enyi entropy, including the massless renormalized R\'enyi entropy and calculable contributions to the perimeter law.
A bstract We study the timelike entanglement entropy (TEE) in two dimensional conformal field theories (CFT) with gravitational anomalies. We employ analytical continuation to compute the timelike entanglement entropy for a pure timelike interval in such CFTs. We find that, unlike the real part, the imaginary part of the TEE displays an asymmetric dependence on the central charges of the left and right moving modes. We propose that the asymmetric dependence on central charges of the imaginary part of the TEE can be used to probe the presence of gravitational anomalies in chiral CFT. Furthermore, we propose a holographic construction to obtain the timelike entanglement entropy from the bulk dual geometries involving topologically massive gravity in AdS 3 . The holographic results obtained match exactly with the dual field theory results.
We study entanglement entropy for parity-violating (time-reversal breaking) quantum field theories on R1,2{\mathbb{R}}^{1,2}R1,2 in the presence of a domain wall between two distinct parity-odd phases. The domain wall hosts a 1+11+11+1-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) with nontrivial chiral central charge. Such a CFT possesses gravitational anomalies. It has been shown recently that, as a consequence, its intrinsic entanglement entropy is sensitive to Lorentz boosts around the entangling surface. Here, we show using various methods that the entanglement entropy of the three-dimensional bulk theory is also sensitive to such boosts owing to parity-violating effects, and that the bulk response to a Lorentz boost precisely cancels the contribution coming from the domain wall CFT. We argue that this can naturally be interpreted as entanglement inflow (i.e., inflow of entanglement entropy analogous to the familiar Callan-Harvey effect) between the bulk and the domain-wall, mediated by the low-lying states in the entanglement spectrum. These results can be generally applied to 2+12+12+1-d topological phases of matter that have edge theories with gravitational anomalies, and provide a precise connection between the gravitational anomaly of the physical edge theory and the low-lying spectrum of the entanglement Hamiltonian.
We study the entanglement entropy, the Rényi entropy, and the mutual (Rényi) information of Dirac fermions on a 2 dimensional torus in the presence of constant gauge fields. We derive their general formulas using the equivalence between twisted boundary conditions and the background gauge fields. Novel and interesting physical consequences have been presented in arXiv:1705.01859 . Here we provide detailed computations of the entropies and mutual information in a low temperature limit, a large radius limit, and a high temperature limit. The high temperature limit reveals rather different physical properties compared to those of the low temperature one: there exist two non-trivial limits that depend on a modulus parameter and are not smoothly connected.
A bstract The study of entanglement in gauge theories is expected to provide insights into many fundamental phenomena, including confinement. However, calculations of quantities related to entanglement in gauge theories are limited by ambiguities that stem from the non-factorizability of the Hilbert space. In this work we study lattice gauge theories that admit a dual description in terms of spin models, for which the replica trick and Rényi entropies are well defined. In the first part of this work, we explicitly perform the duality transformation in a replica geometry, deriving the structure of a replica space for a gauge theory. Then, in the second part, we calculate, by means of Monte Carlo simulations, the entropic c-function of the ℤ 2 gauge theory in three spacetime dimensions, exploiting its dual description in terms of the three-dimensional Ising model.