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arXiv:1603.02684 · Physical Review Letters

Cornering Gapless Quantum States via Their Torus Entanglement

William Witczak‐Krempa, Lauren E. Hayward Sierens, Roger G. Melko

Published Feb 16, 2017• 18 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The entanglement entropy (EE) has emerged as an important window into the structure of complex quantum states of matter. We analyze the universal part of the EE for gapless systems on tori in 2D and 3D, denoted by χ. Focusing on scale-invariant systems, we derive general nonperturbative properties for the shape dependence of χ and reveal surprising relations to the EE associated with corners in the entangling surface. We obtain closed-form expressions for χ in 2D and 3D within a model that arises in the study of conformal field theories (CFTs), and we use them to obtain Ansätze without fitting parameters for the 2D and 3D free boson CFTs. Our numerical lattice calculations show that the Ansätze are highly accurate. Finally, we discuss how the torus EE can act as a fingerprint of exotic states such as gapless quantum spin liquids, e.g., Kitaev's honeycomb model.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.118.077202

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The entanglement entropy (EE) has emerged as an important window into the structure of complex quantum states of matter. We analyze the universal part of the EE for gapless systems on tori in 2D and 3D, denoted by χ. Focusing on scale-invariant systems, we derive general nonperturbative properties for the shape dependence of χ and reveal surprising relations to the EE associated with corners in the entangling surface. We obtain closed-form expressions for χ in 2D and 3D within a model that arises in the study of conformal field theories (CFTs), and we use them to obtain Ansätze without fitting parameters for the 2D and 3D free boson CFTs. Our numerical lattice calculations show that the Ansätze are highly accurate. Finally, we discuss how the torus EE can act as a fingerprint of exotic states such as gapless quantum spin liquids, e.g., Kitaev's honeycomb model.
Abstract We study the von Neumann and Rényi entanglement entropy (EE) of the scale-invariant theories defined on the tori in 2 + 1 and 3 + 1 spacetime dimensions. We focus on the spatial bi-partitions of the torus into two cylinders, and allow for twisted boundary conditions along the non-contractible cycles. Various analytical and numerical results are obtained for the universal EE of the relativistic boson and Dirac fermion conformal field theories (CFTs), the fermionic quadratic band touching and the boson with z = 2 Lifshitz scaling. The shape dependence of the EE clearly distinguishes these theories, although intriguing similarities are found in certain limits. We also study the evolution of the EE when a mass is introduced to detune the system from its scale-invariant point, by employing a renormalized EE that goes beyond a naive subtraction of the area law. In certain cases we find the non-monotonic behavior of the torus EE under RG flow, which distinguishes it from the EE of a disk.
The entanglement entropy (EE) can measure the entanglement between a spatial subregion and its complement, which provides key information about quantum states. Here, rather than focusing on specific regions, we study how the entanglement entropy changes with small deformations of the entangling surface. This leads to the notion of entanglement susceptibilities. These relate the variation of the EE to the geometric variation of the subregion. We determine the form of the leading entanglement susceptibilities for a large class of scale invariant states, such as the ground states of conformal field theories, and systems with Lifshitz scaling, which includes fixed points governed by disorder. We then use the susceptibilities to derive the universal contributions that arise due to nonsmooth features in the entangling surface: corners in two dimensions, as well as cones and trihedral vertices in three dimensions. We finally discuss the generalization to R\'enyi entropies.
Quantum many-body systems have a rich structure in the presence of boundaries. We study the ground states of conformal field theories (CFTs) and Lifshitz field theories in the presence of a boundary through the lens of the entanglement entropy. For a family of theories in general dimensions, we relate the universal terms in the entanglement entropy of the bulk theory with the corresponding terms for the theory with a boundary. This relation imposes a condition on certain boundary central charges. For example, in 2+12+12+1 dimensions, we show that the corner-induced logarithmic terms of free CFTs and certain Lifshitz theories are simply related to those that arise when the corner touches the boundary. We test our findings on the lattice, including a numerical implementation of Neumann boundary conditions. We also propose an ansatz, the boundary extensive mutual information model, for a CFT with a boundary whose entanglement entropy is purely geometrical. This model shows the same bulk-boundary connection as Dirac fermions and certain supersymmetric CFTs that have a holographic dual. Finally, we discuss how our results can be generalized to all dimensions as well as to massive quantum field theories.
We study the universal scaling behavior of the entanglement entropy of critical theories in 2 + 1 dimensions. We specially consider two fermionic scale-invariant models, free massless Dirac fermions and a model of fermions with quadratic band touching, and numerically study the two-cylinder entanglement entropy of the models on the torus. We find that in both cases the entanglement entropy satisfies the area law and has the subleading term which is a scaling function of the aspect ratios of the cylindrical regions. We test the scaling of entanglement in both the free fermion models using three possible scaling functions for the subleading term derived from (a) the quasi-1D conformal field theory, (b) the bosonic quantum Lifshitz model and (c) the holographic AdS/CFT correspondence. For the later case we construct an analytic scaling function using holography, appropriate for critical theories with a gravitational dual description. We find that the subleading term in the fermionic models is well described, for a range of aspect ratios, by the scaling form derived from the quantum Lifshitz model as well as that derived using the AdS/CFT correspondence (in this case only for the Dirac model). For the case where the fermionic models are placed on a square torus we find the fit to the different scaling forms is in agreement to surprisingly high precision.
A quantum critical (QC) fluid exhibits universal subleading corrections to the area law of its entanglement entropies. In two dimensions, when the partition involves a corner of angle $\ensuremath{\theta}$, the subleading term is logarithmic with coefficient ${a}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}(\ensuremath{\theta})$ for the $\ensuremath{\alpha}$-R\'enyi entropy. In the smooth limit $\ensuremath{\theta}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\pi},{a}_{1}(\ensuremath{\theta})$ yields the central charge of the stress tensor when the QC point is described by a conformal field theory (CFT). For general R\'enyi indices and angles, ${a}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}(\ensuremath{\theta})$ is richer and few general results exist. We study ${a}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}(\ensuremath{\theta})$ focusing on two benchmark CFTs, the free Dirac fermion and boson. We perform numerical lattice calculations to obtain high precision results in $\ensuremath{\theta},\ensuremath{\alpha}$ regimes hitherto unexplored. We derive field theory estimates for ${a}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}(\ensuremath{\theta})$, including exact results, and demonstrate an excellent quantitative match with our numerical calculations. We also develop and test strong lower bounds, which apply to both free and interacting QC systems. Finally, we comment on the near collapse of ${a}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}(\ensuremath{\theta})$ for various theories, including interacting O(N)O(N)O(N) models.
We study universal features in the shape dependence of entanglement entropy in the vacuum state of a conformal field theory (CFT) on R1,d−1 {\mathrm{\mathbb{R}}}^{1,d-1} R1,d−1 . We consider the entanglement entropy across a deformed planar or spherical entangling surface in terms of a perturbative expansion in the infinitesimal shape deformation. In particular, we focus on the second order term in this expansion, known as the entanglement density. This quantity is known to be non-positive by the strong-subadditivity property. We show from a purely field theory calculation that the non-local part of the entanglement density in any CFT is universal, and proportional to the coefficient C T appearing in the two-point function of stress tensors in that CFT. As applications of our result, we prove the conjectured universality of the corner term coefficient σCT=π224 \frac{\sigma }{C_T}=\frac{\pi^2}{24} CT​σ​=24π2​ in d = 3 CFTs, and the holographic Mezei formula for entanglement entropy across deformed spheres.