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arXiv:1612.07769 · Physical review. D/Physical review. D.

First law of entanglement rates from holography

Andy O’Bannon, Jonas Probst, Ronnie Rodgers, Christoph F. Uhlemann

Published Sep 21, 2017• 14 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

For a perturbation of the state of a conformal field theory (CFT), the response of the entanglement entropy is governed by the so-called ``first law'' of entanglement entropy, in which the change in entanglement entropy is proportional to the change in energy. Whether such a first law holds for other types of perturbations, such as a change to the CFT Lagrangian, remains an open question. We use holography to study the evolution in time $t$ of entanglement entropy for a CFT driven by a $t$-linear source for a conserved $U(1)$ current or marginal scalar operator. We find that although the usual first law of entanglement entropy may be violated, a first law for the rates of change of entanglement entropy and energy still holds. More generally, we prove that this first law for rates holds in holography for any asymptotically ($d+1$)-dimensional anti--de Sitter metric perturbation whose $t$ dependence first appears at order ${z}^{d}$ in the Fefferman-Graham expansion about the boundary at $z=0$.

DOI
10.1103/physrevd.96.066028

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For a perturbation of the state of a conformal field theory (CFT), the response of the entanglement entropy is governed by the so-called ``first law'' of entanglement entropy, in which the change in entanglement entropy is proportional to the change in energy. Whether such a first law holds for other types of perturbations, such as a change to the CFT Lagrangian, remains an open question. We use holography to study the evolution in time ttt of entanglement entropy for a CFT driven by a ttt-linear source for a conserved U(1)U(1)U(1) current or marginal scalar operator. We find that although the usual first law of entanglement entropy may be violated, a first law for the rates of change of entanglement entropy and energy still holds. More generally, we prove that this first law for rates holds in holography for any asymptotically (d+1d+1d+1)-dimensional anti--de Sitter metric perturbation whose ttt dependence first appears at order zd{z}^{d}zd in the Fefferman-Graham expansion about the boundary at z=0z=0z=0.
For time-independent excited states in conformal field theories, the entanglement entropy of small subsystems satisfies a ‘first law’-like relation, in which the change in entanglement is proportional to the energy within the entangling region. Such a law holds for time-dependent scenarios as long as the state is perturbatively close to the vacuum, but is not expected otherwise. In this paper we use holography to investigate the spread of entanglement entropy for unitary evolutions of special physical interest, the so-called global quenches. We model these using AdS-Vaidya geometries. We find that the first law of entanglement is replaced by a linear response relation, in which the energy density takes the role of the source and is integrated against a time-dependent kernel with compact support. For adiabatic quenches the standard first law is recovered, while for rapid quenches the linear response includes an extra term that encodes the process of thermalization. This extra term has properties that resemble a time-dependent ‘relative entropy’. We propose that this quantity serves as a useful order parameter to characterize far-from-equilibrium excited states. We illustrate our findings with concrete examples, including generic power-law and periodically driven quenches.
We use holographic duality to study the entanglement entropy (EE) of Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) in various spacetime dimensions d, in the presence of various deformations: a relevant Lorentz scalar operator with constant source, a temperature T , a chemical potential μ, a marginal Lorentz scalar operator with source linear in a spatial coordinate, and a circle-compactified spatial direction. We consider EE between a strip or sphere sub-region and the rest of the system, and define the “entanglement density” (ED) as the change in EE due to the deformation, divided by the sub-region’s volume. Using the deformed CFTs above, we show how the ED’s dependence on the strip width or sphere radius, L, is useful for characterizing states of matter. For example, the ED’s small-L behavior is determined either by the dimension of the perturbing operator or by the first law of EE. For Lorentz-invariant renormalization group (RG) flows between CFTs, the “area theorem” states that the coefficient of the EE’s area law term must be larger in the UV than in the IR. In these cases the ED must therefore approach zero from below as L→∞. However, when Lorentz symmetry is broken and the IR fixed point has different scaling from the UV, we find that the ED often approaches the thermal entropy density from above, indicating area theorem violation.
For holographic CFT states near the vacuum, entanglement entropies for spatial subsystems can be expressed perturbatively as an expansion in the one-point functions of local operators dual to light bulk fields. Using the connection between quantum Fisher information for CFT states and canonical energy for the dual spacetimes, we describe a general formula for this expansion up to second-order in the one-point functions, for an arbitrary ball-shaped region, extending the first-order result given by the entanglement first law. For two-dimensional CFTs, we use this to derive a completely explicit formula for the second-order contribution to the entanglement entropy from the stress tensor. We show that this stress tensor formula can be reproduced by a direct CFT calculation for states related to the vacuum by a local conformal transformation. This result can also be reproduced via the perturbative solution to a non-linear scalar wave equation on an auxiliary de Sitter spacetime, extending the first-order result in arXiv:1509.00113 .
We compute change in entanglement entropy for a single interval in the 1+11+11+1-dimensional sine-Gordon model perturbatively in the coupling. The sine-Gordon perturbation can be thought of as deformation of the free conformal field theory by a primary operator with dimension $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$. In an independent computation we calculate holographic entanglement entropy for that interval from three-dimensional bulk anti--de Sitter space which has a massive scalar with its mass satisfying ${m}^{2}=\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}(\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{-}2)$. We show that the two results match for near-marginal perturbations up to leading order in the coupling.
A bstract We extend the entanglement first law of conformal field theory (CFT) to timelike subregions. Focusing on intervals along the time direction of the boundary CFT, we show that the associated timelike entanglement entropy obeys a first-law-like relation, with an effective entanglement temperature inversely proportional to the temporal size of the interval. By implementing a double Wick rotation, we obtain the exact modular Hamiltonian for a suitable hyperbolic subsystem and use it to formulate the timelike entanglement first law precisely. Our central result is a detailed proof that, in asymptotically Anti-de Sitter spacetime, this timelike entanglement first law is equivalent to linearized Einstein’s equations in the bulk: the first law follows from the linearized equations and, conversely, implies them. Our results further reveal the dynamical connections between entanglement and gravity.
We demonstrate that for general conformal field theories (CFTs), the entanglement for small perturbations of the vacuum is organized in a novel holographic way. For spherical entangling regions in a constant time slice, perturbations in the entanglement entropy are solutions of a Klein-Gordon equation in an auxiliary de Sitter (dS) spacetime. The role of the emergent time-like direction in dS is played by the size of the entangling sphere. For CFTs with extra conserved charges, e.g., higher spin charges, we show that each charge gives rise to a separate dynamical scalar field in dS.