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arXiv:1607.05656 · Nuclear Physics B

Branch point twist field correlators in the massive free Boson theory

Davide Bianchini, Olalla A. Castro-Alvaredo

Published Oct 27, 2016• 56 citations
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Abstract

Well-known measures of entanglement in one-dimensional many body quantum systems, such as the entanglement entropy and the logarithmic negativity, may be expressed in terms of the correlation functions of local fields known as branch point twist fields in a replica quantum field theory. In this “replica” approach the computation of measures of entanglement generally involves a mathematically non-trivial analytic continuation in the number of replicas. In this paper we consider two-point functions of twist fields and their analytic continuation in the 1+1 dimensional massive (non-compactified) free Boson theory. This is one of the few theories for which all matrix elements of twist fields are known so that we may hope to compute correlation functions very precisely. We study two particular two-point functions which are related to the logarithmic negativity of semi-infinite disjoint intervals and to the entanglement entropy of one interval. We show that our prescription for the analytic continuation yields results which are in full agreement with conformal field theory predictions in the short-distance limit. We provide numerical estimates of universal quantities and their ratios, both in the massless (twist field structure constants) and the massive (expectation values of twist fields) theory. We find that particular ratios are given by divergent form factor expansions. We propose such divergences stem from the presence of logarithmic factors in addition to the expected power-law behaviour of two-point functions at short-distances. Surprisingly, at criticality these corrections give rise to a log⁡(log⁡ℓ) correction to the entanglement entropy of one interval of length ℓ. This hitherto overlooked result is in agreement with results by Calabrese, Cardy and Tonni and has been independently derived by Blondeau-Fournier and Doyon [25].

DOI
10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2016.10.016

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Well-known measures of entanglement in one-dimensional many body quantum systems, such as the entanglement entropy and the logarithmic negativity, may be expressed in terms of the correlation functions of local fields known as branch point twist fields in a replica quantum field theory. In this “replica” approach the computation of measures of entanglement generally involves a mathematically non-trivial analytic continuation in the number of replicas. In this paper we consider two-point functions of twist fields and their analytic continuation in the 1+1 dimensional massive (non-compactified) free Boson theory. This is one of the few theories for which all matrix elements of twist fields are known so that we may hope to compute correlation functions very precisely. We study two particular two-point functions which are related to the logarithmic negativity of semi-infinite disjoint intervals and to the entanglement entropy of one interval. We show that our prescription for the analytic continuation yields results which are in full agreement with conformal field theory predictions in the short-distance limit. We provide numerical estimates of universal quantities and their ratios, both in the massless (twist field structure constants) and the massive (expectation values of twist fields) theory. We find that particular ratios are given by divergent form factor expansions. We propose such divergences stem from the presence of logarithmic factors in addition to the expected power-law behaviour of two-point functions at short-distances. Surprisingly, at criticality these corrections give rise to a log⁡(log⁡ℓ) correction to the entanglement entropy of one interval of length ℓ. This hitherto overlooked result is in agreement with results by Calabrese, Cardy and Tonni and has been independently derived by Blondeau-Fournier and Doyon [25].
Abstract All standard measures of bipartite entanglement in one-dimensional quantum field theories can be expressed in terms of correlators of branch point twist fields, here denoted by and . These are symmetry fields associated to cyclic permutation symmetry in a replica theory and having the smallest conformal dimension at the critical point. Recently, other twist fields (composite twist fields), typically of higher dimension, have been shown to play a role in the study of a new measure of entanglement known as the symmetry resolved entanglement entropy. In this paper we give an exact expression for the two-point function of a composite twist field that arises in the Ising field theory. In doing so we extend the techniques originally developed for the standard branch point twist field in free theories as well as an existing computation due to Horváth and Calabrese of the same two-point function which focused on the leading large-distance contribution. We study the ground state two-point function of the composite twist field and its conjugate . At criticality, this field can be defined as the leading field in the operator product expansion of and the disorder field µ. We find a general formula for log 〈 T μ ( 0 ) T μ † ( r ) 〉 and for (the derivative of) its analytic continuation to positive real replica numbers greater than 1. We check our formula for consistency by showing that at short distances it exactly reproduces the expected conformal dimension.
Abstract The evaluation of vacuum expectation values (VEVs) in massive integrable quantum field theory (QFT) is a nontrivial renormalization-group ‘connection problem’—relating large and short distance asymptotics—and is in general unsolved. This is particularly relevant in the context of entanglement entropy, where VEVs of branch-point twist fields give universal saturation predictions. We propose a new method to compute VEVs of twist fields associated to continuous symmetries in QFT. The method is based on a differential equation in the continuous symmetry parameter, and gives VEVs as infinite form-factor series which truncate at two-particle level in free QFT. We verify the method by studying U ( 1 ) twist fields in free models, which are simply related to the branch-point twist fields. We provide the first exact formulae for the VEVs of such fields in the massive uncompactified free boson model, checking against an independent calculation based on angular quantization. We show that logarithmic terms, overlooked in the original work of Callan and Wilczek (1994 Phys. Lett . B 333 55–61), appear both in the massless and in the massive situations. This implies that, in agreement with numerical form-factor observations by Bianchini and Castro-Alvaredo (2016 Nucl. Phys . B 913 879–911), the standard power-law short-distance behavior is corrected by a logarithmic factor. We discuss how this gives universal formulae for the saturation of entanglement entropy of a single interval in near-critical harmonic chains, including log log corrections.
This manuscript is a review of the main results obtained in a series of papers involving the present authors and their collaborator J.L. Cardy over the last two years. In our work we have developed and applied a new approach for the computation of the bi-partite entanglement entropy in massive 1+1-dimensional quantum field theories. In most of our work we have considered these theories to be also integrable. Our approach combines two main ingredients: the "replica trick" and form factors for integrable models and more generally for massive quantum field theory. Our basic idea for combining fruitfully these two ingredients is that of the branch-point twist field. By the replica trick we obtained an alternative way of expressing the entanglement entropy as a function of the correlation functions of branch-point twist fields. On the other hand, a generalisation of the form factor program has allowed us to study, and in integrable cases to obtain exact expressions for, form factors of such twist fields. By the usual decomposition of correlation functions in an infinite series involving form factors, we obtained exact results for the infrared behaviours of the bi-partite entanglement entropy, and studied both its infrared and ultraviolet behaviours for different kinds of models: with and without boundaries and backscattering, at and out of integrability.
We study the entanglement of two disjoint intervals in the conformal field theory of the Luttinger liquid (free compactified boson). Tr ρ A n for any integer n is calculated as the four-point function of twist fields of a particular type and the final result is expressed in a compact form in terms of the Riemann–Siegel theta functions. In the decompactification limit we provide the analytic continuation valid for all model parameters and from this we extract the entanglement entropy. These predictions are checked against existing numerical data.
We continue the study of the entanglement entropy of two disjoint intervals in conformal field theories that we started in J. Stat. Mech. (2009) P11001. We compute Trρ_A^n for any integer n for the Ising universality class and the final result is expressed as a sum of Riemann-Siegel theta functions. These predictions are checked against existing numerical data. We provide a systematic method that gives the full asymptotic expansion of the scaling function for small four-point ratio (i.e. short intervals). These formulas are compared with the direct expansion of the full results for free compactified boson and Ising model. We finally provide the analytic continuation of the first term in this expansion in a completely analytic form.
Abstract In this paper we study the increment of the entanglement entropy and of the (replica) logarithmic negativity in a zero-density excited state of a free massive bosonic theory, compared to the ground state. This extends the work of two previous publications by the same authors. We consider the case of two disconnected regions and find that the change in the entanglement entropy depends only on the combined size of the regions and is independent of their connectivity. We subsequently generalize this result to any number of disconnected regions. For the replica negativity we find that its increment is a polynomial with integer coefficients depending only on the sizes of the two regions. The logarithmic negativity turns out to have a more complicated functional structure than its replica version, typically involving roots of polynomials on the sizes of the regions. We obtain our results by two methods already employed in previous work: from a qubit picture and by computing four-point functions of branch point twist fields in finite volume. We test our results against numerical simulations on a harmonic chain and find excellent agreement.