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arXiv:1705.04181 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Entanglement entropy and boundary renormalization group flow: Exact results in the Ising universality class

Eyal Cornfeld, Eran Sela

Published Aug 24, 2017• 15 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The entanglement entropy in one-dimensional critical systems with boundaries has been associated with the noninteger ground-state degeneracy. This quantity, being a characteristic of boundary fixed points, decreases under renormalization group flow, as predicted by the g theorem. Here, using conformal field theory methods, we exactly calculate the entanglement entropy in the boundary Ising universality class. Our expression can be separated into the well-known bulk term and a boundary entanglement term, displaying a universal flow between two boundary conditions, in accordance with the g theorem. These results are obtained within the replica trick approach, where we show that the associated twist field, a central object generating the geometry of an $n$-sheeted Riemann surface, can be bosonized, giving simple analytic access to multiple quantities of interest. We argue that our result applies to other models falling into the same universality class. This includes the vicinity of the quantum critical point of the two-channel Kondo model, allowing one to track in real space the presence of a region containing one-half of a qubit with entropy $\frac{1}{2}log(2)$, associated with a free local Majorana fermion.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.96.075153

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The entanglement entropy in one-dimensional critical systems with boundaries has been associated with the noninteger ground-state degeneracy. This quantity, being a characteristic of boundary fixed points, decreases under renormalization group flow, as predicted by the g theorem. Here, using conformal field theory methods, we exactly calculate the entanglement entropy in the boundary Ising universality class. Our expression can be separated into the well-known bulk term and a boundary entanglement term, displaying a universal flow between two boundary conditions, in accordance with the g theorem. These results are obtained within the replica trick approach, where we show that the associated twist field, a central object generating the geometry of an nnn-sheeted Riemann surface, can be bosonized, giving simple analytic access to multiple quantities of interest. We argue that our result applies to other models falling into the same universality class. This includes the vicinity of the quantum critical point of the two-channel Kondo model, allowing one to track in real space the presence of a region containing one-half of a qubit with entropy 12log(2)\frac{1}{2}log(2)21​log(2), associated with a free local Majorana fermion.
We investigate the second-order Rényi entanglement entropy at the quantum critical point of a spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on a columnar dimerized square lattice. The universal constant γγγ in the area-law scaling S2(ℓ)=αℓ−γS_{2}(\ell) = α\ell - γS2​(ℓ)=αℓ−γ is found to be sensitive to the entangling surface configurations, with γsp>0γ_{\text{sp}} > 0γsp​>0 for strong-bond-cut (special) surfaces and γord<0γ_{\text{ord}} < 0γord​<0 for weak-bond-cut (ordinary) surfaces, which is attributed to the distinct conformal boundary conditions. Introducing boundary dimerization drives a renormalization group (RG) flow from the special to the ordinary boundary criticality, and the constant γγγ decreases monotonically with increasing dimerization strength, demonstrating irreversible evolution under the boundary RG flow. These results provide numerical evidence for a higher-dimensional analog of the ggg theorem, and suggest γγγ as a possible characteristic function for boundary RG flow in (2+1)(2+1)(2+1)-dimensional conformal field theory.
Abstract Spacetime boundaries with canonical Neuman or Dirichlet conditions preserve conformal invarience, but “mixed” boundary conditions which interpolate linearly between them can break conformal symmetry and generate interesting Renormalization Group flows even when a theory is free, providing soluble models with nontrivial scale dependence. We compute the (Rindler) entanglement entropy for a free scalar field with mixed boundary conditions in half Minkowski space and in Anti-de Sitter space. In the latter case we also compute an additional geometric contribution, which according to a recent proposal then collectively give the 1/N corrections to the entanglement entropy of the conformal field theory dual. We obtain some perturbatively exact results in both cases which illustrate monotonic interpolation between ultraviolet and infrared fixed points. This is consistent with recent work on the irreversibility of renormalization group, allowing some assessment of the aforementioned proposal for holographic entanglement entropy and illustrating the generalization of the g-theorem for boundary conformal field theory.
We explore entanglement entropy of a cap-like region for a generic quantum field theory residing in the Bunch-Davies vacuum on de Sitter space. Entanglement entropy in our setup is identical with the thermal entropy in the static patch of de Sitter, and we derive a simple relation between the vacuum expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor trace and the RG flow of entanglement entropy. In particular, renormalization of the bare couplings and logarithmic divergence of the entanglement entropy are interrelated in our setup. We confirm our findings by recovering known universal contributions for a free field theory deformed by a mass operator as well as obtain correct universal behaviour at the fixed points. Simple examples of entanglement entropy flows are elaborated in d=2,3,4. Inthreedimensionswefindthatwhiletherenormalizedentanglemententropy is stationary at the fixed points, it is not monotonic. We provide a computational evidence that the universal ‘area law’ for a conformally coupled scalar is different from the known result in the literature, and argue that this difference survives in the limit of flat space. Finally, we carry out the spectral decomposition of entanglement entropy flow and discuss its application to the F-theorem.
We analyze the effect of decoherence, modeled by local quantum channels, on quantum critical states and we find universal properties of the resulting mixed state's entanglement, both between system and environment and within the system. Renyi entropies exhibit volume law scaling with a subleading constant governed by a "g function" in conformal field theory, allowing us to define a notion of renormalization group (RG) flow (or "phase transitions") between quantum channels. We also find that the entropy of a subsystem in the decohered state has a subleading logarithmic scaling with subsystem size, and we relate it to correlation functions of boundary condition changing operators in the conformal field theory. Finally, we find that the subsystem entanglement negativity, a measure of quantum correlations within mixed states, can exhibit log scaling or area law based on the RG flow. When the channel corresponds to a marginal perturbation, the coefficient of the log scaling can change continuously with decoherence strength. We illustrate all these possibilities for the critical ground state of the transverse-field Ising model, in which we identify four RG fixed points of dephasing channels and verify the RG flow numerically. Our results are relevant to quantum critical states realized on noisy quantum simulators, in which our predicted entanglement scaling can be probed via shadow tomography methods.
We study boundary renormalization group flows between boundary conformal field theories in 1 + 1 dimensions using methods of quantum information theory. We define an entropic g-function for theories with impurities in terms of the relative entanglement entropy, and we prove that this g-function decreases along boundary renormalization group flows. This entropic g-theorem is valid at zero temperature, and is independent from the g-theorem based on the thermal partition function. We also discuss the mutual information in boundary RG flows, and how it encodes the correlations between the impurity and bulk degrees of freedom. Our results provide a quantum-information understanding of (boundary) RG flow as increase of distinguishability between the UV fixed point and the theory along the RG flow.
Entanglement is a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics and plays an important role in characterizing many-body systems and quantum phase transitions. A quantitative measure of quantum correlations between subsystems is entanglement entropy. In this thesis, we study the entanglement entropy of an interacting quantum field theory, the O(N) model. In local quantum field theories, the leading-order contribution in the scaling of entanglement entropy obeys an area law. This dominant term is governed by short-distance physics near the entangling surface and depends on the ultraviolet regularization, making it non-universal. Beyond this lead- ing scaling behavior, entanglement entropy can contain subleading universal contributions, which encode intrinsic information about the underlying quantum field theory. In this thesis, we calculate one such universal term: the correlation length coefficient r, which appears as a correction to the entanglement entropy evaluated slightly away from the quantum critical point. The analysis is carried out in D = 2 + 1 spacetime dimensions for an infinite cylindrical geometry. We study the model in the vicinity of criticality using the large-N expansion, which enables controlled analytical calculations. Our main result is that the coefficient r scales linearly with the number of field components N . This behavior is consistent with the interpretation of r as a universal quantity associated with the degrees of freedom of the theory. The calculation is based on the replica method and renormalization group arguments, which are presented in detail. Finally, we discuss the physical meaning of the result and possible methods for verifying it, and we review related results for the O(N) model in different geometries.