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arXiv:1711.02126 · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical

Entanglement evolution across a conformal interface

Xueda Wen, Yuxuan Wang, Shinsei Ryu

Published Mar 9, 2018• 26 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract For two-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) in the ground state, it is known that a conformal interface along the entanglement cut can suppress the entanglement entropy from to , where L is the length of the subsystem A , and is the effective central charge which depends on the transmission property of the conformal interface. In this work, by making use of conformal mappings, we show that a conformal interface has the same effect on entanglement evolution in non-equilibrium cases, including global, local and certain inhomogeneous quantum quenches. I.e. a conformal interface suppresses the time evolution of entanglement entropy by effectively replacing the central charge c with , where is exactly the same as that in the ground state case. We confirm this conclusion by a numerical study on a critical fermion chain. Furthermore, based on the quasi-particle picture, we conjecture that this conclusion holds for an arbitrary quantum quench in CFTs, as long as the initial state can be described by a regularized conformal boundary state.

DOI
10.1088/1751-8121/aab561

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Abstract For two-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) in the ground state, it is known that a conformal interface along the entanglement cut can suppress the entanglement entropy from to , where L is the length of the subsystem A , and is the effective central charge which depends on the transmission property of the conformal interface. In this work, by making use of conformal mappings, we show that a conformal interface has the same effect on entanglement evolution in non-equilibrium cases, including global, local and certain inhomogeneous quantum quenches. I.e. a conformal interface suppresses the time evolution of entanglement entropy by effectively replacing the central charge c with , where is exactly the same as that in the ground state case. We confirm this conclusion by a numerical study on a critical fermion chain. Furthermore, based on the quasi-particle picture, we conjecture that this conclusion holds for an arbitrary quantum quench in CFTs, as long as the initial state can be described by a regularized conformal boundary state.
We study the evolution of entanglement after a global quench in a one-dimensional quantum system with a localized impurity. For systems described by a conformal field theory, the entanglement entropy between the two regions separated by the defect grows linearly in time. Introducing the notion of boundary twist fields, we show how the slope of this growth can be related to the effective central charge that emerges in the study of ground-state entropy in the presence of the defect. On the other hand, we also consider a particular lattice realization of the quench in a free-fermion chain with a conformal defect. Starting from a gapped initial state, we obtain the slope via a quasiparticle ansatz and observe small discrepancies between the field theory and lattice results, which persist even in the limit of a vanishing gap.
Entanglement evolutions after a global quantum quench and a local quantum quench in 1+1 dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) show qualitatively different behaviors, and are studied within two different setups. In this work, we bridge global and local quantum quenches in (1+1)-d CFTs in the same setup, by studying the entanglement evolution from a specific inhomogeneous initial state. By utilizing conformal mappings, this inhomogeneous quantum quench is analytically solvable. It is found that the entanglement evolution shows a global quantum quench feature in the short time limit, and a local quantum quench feature in the long time limit. The same features are observed in single-point correlation functions of primary fields. We provide a clear physical picture for the underlying reason.
We study the time evolution of the entanglement negativity after a local quantum quench in (1 + 1)-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs), which we introduce by suddenly joining two initially decoupled CFTs at their end points. We calculate the negativity evolution for both adjacent intervals and disjoint intervals explicitly. For two adjacent intervals, the entanglement negativity grows logarithmically in time right after the quench. After developing a plateau-like feature, the entanglement negativity drops to the ground-state value. For the case of two spatially separated intervals, a light-cone behavior is observed in the negativity evolution; in addition, a long-range entanglement, which is independent of the distance between two intervals, can be created. Our results agree with the heuristic picture that quasiparticles, which carry entanglement, are emitted from the joining point and propagate freely through the system. Our analytical results are confirmed by numerical calculations based on a critical harmonic chain.
The time evolution of the entanglement entropy is a key concept to understand the structure of a nonequilibrium quantum state. In a large class of models, such evolution can be understood in terms of a semiclassical picture of moving quasiparticles spreading the entanglement throughout the system. However, it is not yet known how the entanglement splits between the sectors of an internal local symmetry of a quantum many-body system. Here, guided by the examples of conformal field theories and free-fermion chains, we show that the quasiparticle picture can be adapted to this goal, leading to a general conjecture for the charged entropies whose Fourier transform gives the desired symmetry-resolved entanglement Sn(q){S}_{n}(q)Sn​(q). We point out two physically relevant effects that should be easily observed in atomic experiments: a delay time for the onset of Sn(q){S}_{n}(q)Sn​(q) which grows linearly with $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}q|$ (the difference between the charge qqq and its mean value) and an effective equipartition when $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}q|$ is much smaller than the subsystem size.
Abstract In this work, we study the time evolution of the entanglement Hamiltonian during the process of thermalization in a (1+1)-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) after a quantum quench from a special class of initial states. In particular, we focus on a subsystem which is a finite interval at the end of a semi-infinite line. Based on conformal mappings, the exact forms of both entanglement Hamiltonian and entanglement spectrum of the subsystem can be obtained. Aside from various interesting features, it is found that in the infinite time limit the entanglement Hamiltonian and entanglement spectrum are exactly the same as those in the thermal ensemble. The entanglement spectrum approaches the steady state spectrum exponentially in time. We also study the modular flows generated by the entanglement Hamiltonian in Minkowski spacetime, which provides us with an intuitive picture of how the entanglement propagates and how the subsystem is thermalized. Furthermore, the effect of a generic initial state is also discussed.
A bstract We explore non-equilibrium processes in two-dimensional conformal field theories (2d CFTs) due to the growth of operators induced by inhomogeneous and homogeneous Hamiltonians by investigating the time dependence of the partition function, energy density, and entanglement entropy. The non-equilibrium processes considered in this paper are constructed out of the Lorentzian and Euclidean time evolution governed by different Hamiltonians. We explore the effect of the time ordering on entanglement dynamics so that we find that in a free boson CFT and RCFTs, this time ordering does not affect the entanglement entropy, while in the holographic CFTs, it does. Our main finding is that in the holographic CFTs, the non-unitary time evolution induced by the inhomogeneous Hamiltonian can retain the initial state information longer than in the unitary time evolution.