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arXiv:1907.08508 · Journal of High Energy Physics

An inverse mass expansion for the mutual information in free scalar QFT at finite temperature

Dimitrios Katsinis, Georgios Pastras

Published Feb 1, 2020• 6 citations
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Abstract

Abstract We study the entanglement entropy and the mutual information in coupled harmonic systems at finite temperature. Interestingly, we find that the mutual information does not vanish at infinite temperature, but it rather reaches a specific finite value, which can be attributed to classical correlations solely. We further obtain high and low temperature expansions for both quantities. Then, we extend the analysis performed in the seminal paper by Srednicki [1] for free real scalar field theories in Minkowski space-time in 3 + 1 dimensions at a thermal state. We find that the mutual information obeys an area law, similar to that obeyed by the entanglement entropy at vanishing temperature. The coefficient of this area law does not vanish at infinite temperature. Then, we calculate this coefficient perturbatively in a 1/μ expansion, where μ is the mass of the scalar field. Finally, we study the high and low temperature behaviour of the area law term.

DOI
10.1007/jhep02(2020)091

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Abstract We study the entanglement entropy and the mutual information in coupled harmonic systems at finite temperature. Interestingly, we find that the mutual information does not vanish at infinite temperature, but it rather reaches a specific finite value, which can be attributed to classical correlations solely. We further obtain high and low temperature expansions for both quantities. Then, we extend the analysis performed in the seminal paper by Srednicki [1] for free real scalar field theories in Minkowski space-time in 3 + 1 dimensions at a thermal state. We find that the mutual information obeys an area law, similar to that obeyed by the entanglement entropy at vanishing temperature. The coefficient of this area law does not vanish at infinite temperature. Then, we calculate this coefficient perturbatively in a 1/μ expansion, where μ is the mass of the scalar field. Finally, we study the high and low temperature behaviour of the area law term.
We extend the entanglement entropy calculation performed in the seminal paper by Srednicki (Phys Rev Lett 71:666, 1993) for free real massive scalar field theories in 1+11+11+1 1 + 1 , 2+12+12+1 2 + 1 and 3+13+13+1 3 + 1 dimensions. We show that the inverse of the scalar field mass can be used as an expansion parameter for a perturbative calculation of the entanglement entropy. We perform the calculation for the ground state of the system and for a spherical entangling surface at third order in the inverse mass expansion. The calculated entanglement entropy contains a leading area law term, as well as subleading terms that depend on the regularization scheme, as expected. Universal terms are non-perturbative effects in this approach. Interestingly, this perturbative expansion can be used to approximate the coefficient of the area law term, even in the case of a massless scalar field in 2+12+12+1 2 + 1 and 3+13+13+1 3 + 1 dimensions. The presented method provides the spectrum of the reduced density matrix as an intermediate result, which is an important advantage in comparison to the replica trick approach. Our perturbative expansion underlines the relation between the area law and the locality of the underlying field theory.
A bstract The entanglement entropy of a free scalar field in its ground state is dominated by an area law term. It is noteworthy, however, that the study of entanglement in scalar field theory has not advanced far beyond the ground state. In this paper, we extend the study of entanglement of harmonic systems, which include free scalar field theory as a continuum limit, to the case of the most general Gaussian states, namely the squeezed states. We find the eigenstates and the spectrum of the reduced density matrix and we calculate the entanglement entropy. We show that our method is equivalent to the correlation matrix method. Finally, we apply our method to free scalar field theory in 1+1 dimensions and show that, for very squeezed states, the entanglement entropy is dominated by a volume term, unlike the ground-state case. Even though the state of the system is time-dependent in a non-trivial manner, this volume term is time-independent. We expect this behaviour to hold in higher dimensions as well, as it emerges in a large-squeezing expansion of the entanglement entropy for a general harmonic system.
We prove a β2β^{2}β2 area law for the quantum mutual information of thermal states of local lattice Hamiltonians: for any bipartitioning A∣BA|BA∣B and all inverse temperatures βββ below a critical value β∗β^{*}β∗, we show Iβ(A,B)⩽f~(β) β2 ∣∂AB∣\mathcal{I}_β(A,B) \leqslant \tilde{f}(β)\, β^{2}\,|\partial_{AB}|Iβ​(A,B)⩽f~​(β)β2∣∂AB​∣, where ∣∂AB∣|\partial_{AB}|∣∂AB​∣ denotes the size of the boundary region and f~(β)\tilde{f}(β)f~​(β) remains finite as β→0β\to 0β→0. This quadratic scaling improves the relationship between high-temperature correlations and macroscopic thermodynamics. While a linear area law implicitly permits a loose, temperature-independent upper bound on extractable work and binding energy, the quadratic scaling ensures that the nonequilibrium free energy available after decoupling regions and the total energy of the interface both are proportional to the area of the interface of A∣BA|BA∣B and vanish as βββ at high temperatures. These results show that the high-temperature mutual information and correlation are suppressed, respectively, quadratically and linearly in inverse temperature, which are consistent with the expected thermal decoupling in macroscopic thermodynamic quantities.
Abstract Entropy is a quantity for counting physical degrees of freedom in a system. At a finite temperature, one can use thermal entropy to study thermodynamical properties. At zero temperature, entanglement entropy is expected to provide a suitable order parameter of a phase structure. Especially, the entanglement entropy exhibits an interesting codimension two area law in a strongly coupled conformal field theory. We compute thermal entropy in a non-relativistic model with an infinite fermion mass limit from an exact effective potential to obtain thermal entropy at an infinite strong coupling limit. The computational result provides vanishing thermal entropy at an infinite strong coupling limit with a finite lattice spacing. The non-trivial topological term can be included in the strongly coupled lattice system to obtain the non-trivial entropy and the topology can be marked from the entropy. We first compute the thermal entropy in a two-dimensional (2D) lattice topological quantum field theory to study the lattice artifact and also argue that a theory possibly has translational invariance if a system does not have a volume law in the entanglement entropy. Finally, we show that a coefficient of a universal term of the entanglement entropy should not be affected by a choice of an entangling surface in 2D conformal field theory for one interval case. We also discuss a choice of the entangling surface in the entanglement entropy in 2D model at the large N limit.
Abstract Relative entropy is a powerful measure of the dissimilarity between two statistical field theories in the continuum. In this work, we study the relative entropy between Gaussian scalar field theories in a finite volume with different masses and boundary conditions. We show that the relative entropy depends crucially on d , the dimension of Euclidean space. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the mutual information between two disjoint regions in Rd\mathbb {R}^dRd R d is finite if the two regions are separated by a finite distance and satisfies an area law. We then construct an example of “touching” regions between which the mutual information is infinite. We argue that the properties of mutual information in scalar field theories can be explained by the Markov property of these theories.