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arXiv:1602.06505 · Physical review. D/Physical review. D.

On dS4 extremal surfaces and entanglement entropy in some ghost CFTs

Krishnan Narayan

Published Aug 3, 2016• 26 citations
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Abstract

In arXiv [K. Narayan, arXiv:1501.03019.], the areas of certain complex extremal surfaces in de Sitter space were found to have resemblance with entanglement entropy in appropriate dual Euclidean nonunitary CFTs, with the area being real and negative in ${\mathrm{dS}}_{4}$. In this paper, we study some toy models of 2-dim ghost conformal field theories with negative central charge with a view to exploring this further from the CFT point of view. In particular we consider $bc$-ghost systems with central charge $c=\ensuremath{-}2$ and study the replica formulation for entanglement entropy for a single interval, and associated issues arising in this case, notably pertaining to (i) the $SL(2)$ vacuum coinciding with the ghost ground state, and (ii) the background charge inherent in these systems which leads to particular forms for the norms of states (involving zero modes). This eventually gives rise to negative entanglement entropy. We also discuss a (logarithmic) CFT of anticommuting scalars, with similarities in some features. Finally we discuss a simple toy model of two ``ghost-spins'' which mimics some of these features.

DOI
10.1103/physrevd.94.046001

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In arXiv [K. Narayan, arXiv:1501.03019.], the areas of certain complex extremal surfaces in de Sitter space were found to have resemblance with entanglement entropy in appropriate dual Euclidean nonunitary CFTs, with the area being real and negative in dS4{\mathrm{dS}}_{4}dS4​. In this paper, we study some toy models of 2-dim ghost conformal field theories with negative central charge with a view to exploring this further from the CFT point of view. In particular we consider bcbcbc-ghost systems with central charge c=\ensuremath−2c=\ensuremath{-}2c=\ensuremath−2 and study the replica formulation for entanglement entropy for a single interval, and associated issues arising in this case, notably pertaining to (i) the SL(2)SL(2)SL(2) vacuum coinciding with the ghost ground state, and (ii) the background charge inherent in these systems which leads to particular forms for the norms of states (involving zero modes). This eventually gives rise to negative entanglement entropy. We also discuss a (logarithmic) CFT of anticommuting scalars, with similarities in some features. Finally we discuss a simple toy model of two ``ghost-spins'' which mimics some of these features.
Ghost spins, 2-level spinlike variables with indefinite norm have been studied in previous work. Here we explore various NNN-level generalizations of ghost spins. First we discuss a flavored generalization comprising NNN copies of the ghost-spin system, as well as certain ghost-spin chains which in the continuum limit lead to 2-dim bcbcbc-ghost conformal field theorys with O(N)O(N)O(N) flavor symmetry. Then we explore a symplectic generalization that involves antisymmetric inner products, and finally a ghost-spin system exhibiting NNN irreducible levels. We also study entanglement properties. In all these cases, we show the existence of positive norm ``correlated ghost spin'' states in two copies of ghost-spin ensembles obtained by entangling identical ghost spins from each copy: these exhibit positive entanglement entropy.
We explore properties of the universal terms in the entanglement entropy and logarithmic negativity in 4D conformal field theories, aiming to clarify the ways in which they behave like the analogous entanglement measures in quantum mechanics. We show that, unlike entanglement entropy in finite-dimensional systems, the sign of the universal part of entanglement entropy is indeterminate. In particular, if and only if the central charges obey a>c, the entanglement across certain classes of entangling surfaces can become arbitrarily negative, depending on the geometry and topology of the surface. The negative contribution is proportional to the product of a-c and the genus of the surface. Similarly, we show that in a>c theories, the logarithmic negativity does not always exceed the entanglement entropy.
It was proposed by Ryu and Takayanagi that the entanglement entropy in conformal field theory (CFT) is related through the AdS/CFT correspondence to the area of a minimal surface in the bulk. We apply this holographic geometrical method of calculating the entanglement entropy to study the vacuum case of a CFT which is holographically dual to empty anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. We present all possible minimal surfaces spanned on one or two spherical boundaries at AdS infinity. We give exact analytical expressions for the regularized areas of these surfaces and identify finite renormalized quantities. In the case of two disjoint boundaries the existence of two different phases of the entanglement entropy is confirmed. A trivial phase corresponds to two disconnected minimal surfaces, while the other one corresponds to a tube connecting the spherical boundaries. A transition between these phases is reminiscent of the finite temperature deconfinement transition in the CFT on the boundary. The exact analytical results are thus consistent with previous numerical and approximate computations. We also briefly discuss the character of a spacetime extension of the minimal surface spanned on two uniformly accelerated boundaries.
This is an extended version of our short report hep-th/0603001, where a holographic interpretation of entanglement entropy in conformal field theories is proposed from AdS/CFT correspondence. In addition to a concise review of relevant recent progresses of entanglement entropy and details omitted in the earlier letter, this paper includes the following several new results: We give a more direct derivation of our claim which relates the entanglement entropy with the minimal area surfaces in the AdS3/CFT2 case as well as some further discussions on higher dimensional cases. Also the relation between the entanglement entropy and central charges in 4D conformal field theories is examined. We check that the logarithmic part of the 4D entanglement entropy computed in the CFT side agrees with the AdS5 result at least under a specific condition. Finally we estimate the entanglement entropy of massive theories in generic dimensions by making use of our proposal.
We introduce a new quantity, called pseudo-entropy, as a generalization of entanglement entropy via postselection. We expect this quantity to provide a new class of order parameters in quantum many-body systems. In the anti--de Sitter space (AdS)/conformal field theory (CFT) correspondence, this quantity is dual to areas of minimal area surfaces in time-dependent Euclidean spaces which are asymptotically AdS. We call this geometric computation of pseudo-entropy via the AdS/CFT\mathrm{AdS}/\mathrm{CFT}AdS/CFT the holographic pseudo-entropy. We study its basic properties and classifications in qubit systems. In specific examples, we provide a quantum information theoretic meaning of this new quantity as an averaged number of Bell pairs when the post-selection is performed. We also present properties of the pseudo-entropy for random states. We then calculate the pseudo-entropy in the presence of local operator excitations for both the two dimensional free massless scalar CFT and two dimensional holographic CFTs. We find a general property in CFTs that the pseudo-entropy is highly reduced when the local operators get closer to the boundary of the subsystem. We also compute the holographic pseudo-entropy for a Janus solution, dual to an exactly marginal perturbation of a two dimensional CFT and find its agreement with a perturbative calculation in the dual CFT. We show the linearity property holds for holographic states, where the holographic pseudo-entropy coincides with a weak value of the area operator. Finally, we propose a mixed state generalization of pseudo-entropy and give its gravity dual.
A holographic correspondence has been recently developed between higher spin theories in three-dimensional anti-de Sitter space (AdS3) and two-dimensional Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) with extended symmetries. A class of such dualities involves SL(N, R) × SL(N, R) Chern-Simons gauge theories in the (2 + 1)-dimensional bulk space-time, and CFTs with WN symmetry algebras on the (1 + 1)-dimensional boundary. The topological character of the bulk theory forces one to reconsider standard geometric notions such as black hole horizons and entropy, as well as the usual holographic dictionary. Motivated by this challenge, in this note we present a proposal to compute entanglement entropy in the WN CFTs via holographic methods. In particular, we introduce a functional constructed from Wilson lines in the bulk Chern-Simons theory that captures the entanglement entropy in the CFTs dual to standard AdS3 gravity, corresponding to SL(2, R) × SL(2, R) gauge group, and admits an immediate generalization to the higher spin case. We explicitly evaluate this functional for several known solutions of the bulk theory, including charged black holes dual to thermal CFT states carrying higher spin charge, and show that it reproduces expected features of entanglement entropy, study whether it obeys strong subadditivity, and moreover show that it reduces to the thermal entropy in the appropriate limit.