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arXiv:2412.10735 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Relative Rényi entropy under local quenches in 2D CFTs

Zi-Xuan Zhao, Song He, Hao Ouyang, Hong-An Zeng, Yu-Xuan Zhang

Published Feb 18, 2026• 1 citation
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Abstract

A bstract We study the relative Rényi entropy (RRE) under local quenches in two-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs), focusing on rational CFTs (RCFTs) and holographic CFTs. In RCFTs, the RRE evolves as a monotonic function over time, depending on finite-dimensional matrices. It is sometimes symmetric, prompting an investigation into its relationship with the squared trace distance. We also observe that relative entropy can fail to distinguish between operators, as it only captures information entering/exiting the subsystem. In holographic CFTs, an analytic continuation of the RRE reveals insights into the entanglement wedge, offering a new perspective on bulk geometry in AdS/CFT. Our results deepen the understanding of quantum information measures in RCFTs and holographic CFTs, highlighting connections to distinguishability and bulk reconstruction.

DOI
10.1007/jhep02(2026)195

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A bstract We study the relative Rényi entropy (RRE) under local quenches in two-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs), focusing on rational CFTs (RCFTs) and holographic CFTs. In RCFTs, the RRE evolves as a monotonic function over time, depending on finite-dimensional matrices. It is sometimes symmetric, prompting an investigation into its relationship with the squared trace distance. We also observe that relative entropy can fail to distinguish between operators, as it only captures information entering/exiting the subsystem. In holographic CFTs, an analytic continuation of the RRE reveals insights into the entanglement wedge, offering a new perspective on bulk geometry in AdS/CFT. Our results deepen the understanding of quantum information measures in RCFTs and holographic CFTs, highlighting connections to distinguishability and bulk reconstruction.
We consider the entanglement entropy in 2d conformal field theory in a class of excited states produced by the insertion of a heavy local operator. These include both high-energy eigenstates of the Hamiltonian and time-dependent local quenches. We compute the universal contribution from the stress tensor to the single interval Renyi entropies and entanglement entropy, and conjecture that this dominates the answer in theories with a large central charge and a sparse spectrum of low-dimension operators. The resulting entanglement entropies agree precisely with holographic calculations in three-dimensional gravity. High-energy eigenstates are dual to microstates of the BTZ black hole, so the corresponding holographic calculation is a geodesic length in the black hole geometry; agreement between these two answers demonstrates that these individual microstates of holographic CFTs effectively thermalize at the level of the single-interval entanglement entropy. For local quenches, the dual geometry is a highly boosted black hole or conical defect. On the CFT side, the rise in entanglement entropy after a quench is directly related to the monodromy of a Virasoro conformal block.
In this thesis we study the time dependence of correlators such as Green function, entanglement (Renyi) entropy and mutual information following quantum quench in Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) and their holographic duals (AdS). We develop a new recursive method to analytically study the thermalization of retarded Green function in CFTs holographically dual to thin shell AdS Vaidya space times. Using this method, analytic results for short time thermalization of the Green function are obtained; its long time behaviour is obtained by implementing this method numerically. This method is also used to study the late time behaviour of the minimally coupled scalar in AdS3 Vaidya and the shear vector mode in AdS5 Vaidya. Studying the latter, we obtain the universal ratio of the shear viscosity to entropy density from a time dependent process. We study the time evolution of single interval Renyi and entanglement entropies following local quantum quenches in CFTs at finite temperature for which the locally excited states have a finite temporal width. We show that the time dependence of Renyi and entanglement entropies, at second order in width, is universal and is determined by the expectation value of the stress tensor in the replica geometry. We study local quenches in two dimensional CFT at large central charge by operators carrying higher spin charge. The holographic description is used to obtain the single interval entanglement entropy, mutual information and scrambling time following the quench. We find that the change in entanglement entropy is finite (and real) only if the spin-three charge, q, is bounded by the energy of the perturbation, E, as |q|/c < E^2/c^2. For larger values of the spin-three charge, the scrambling time is shorter than for pure gravity and controlled by the spin-three Lyapunov exponent.
We explore the role of sandwiched Renyi relative entropy in AdS/CFT and in finite-dimensional models of holographic quantum error correction. In particular, in the context of operator algebra quantum error correction, we discuss a suitable generalization of sandwiched Renyi relative entropy over finite-dimensional von Neumann algebras. It is then shown that the equality of bulk and boundary sandwiched relative Renyi entropies is equivalent to algebraic encoding of bulk and boundary states, the Ryu-Takayanagi formula, the equality of bulk and boundary relative entropy, and subregion duality. This adds another item to an equivalence theorem between the last four items established in arxiv:1607.03901. We then discuss the sandwiched Renyi relative entropy defined in terms of modular operators, and show that this becomes the definition naturally suited to the finite-dimensional models of holographic quantum error correction. Finally, we explore some numerical calculations of sandwiched Renyi relative entropies for a simple holographic random tensor network in order to obtain a better understanding of corrections to the exact equality of bulk and boundary sandwiched relative Renyi entropy.
A bstract The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) in chaotic two dimensional CFTs is subtle due to infinitely many conserved KdV charges. Previous works have demonstrated that primary CFT eigenstates have flat entanglement spectrum, which is very different from the microcanonical ensemble. This result is an apparent contradiction to conventional ETH, which does not take KdV charges into account. In a companion paper [1], we resolve this discrepancy by studying the subsystem entropy of a chaotic CFT in KdV-generalized Gibbs and microcanonical ensembles. In this paper, we carry out parallel computations in the context of AdS/CFT. We focus on the high density limit, which is equivalent to thermodynamic limit in conformal theories. In this limit holographic Renyi entropy can be computed using the so-called gluing construction. We explicitly study the KdV-generalized microcanonical ensemble with the densities of the first two KdV charges ⟨Q1⟩ \left\langle {\mathcal{Q}}_1\right\rangle ⟨Q1​⟩ Q 1 = q 1 , ⟨Q3⟩ \left\langle {\mathcal{Q}}_3\right\rangle ⟨Q3​⟩ Q 3 = q 3 fixed and obeying q 3 − q12≪q12 {q}_1^2\ll {q}_1^2 q12​≪q12​ q 1 2 ≪ q 1 2 . In this regime we found that the refined Renyi entropy S∼n {\overset{\sim }{S}}_n S∼n​ S ~ n is n -independent for n > n cut , where n cut depends on q 1 , q 3 . By taking the primary state limit q 3 → q12 {q}_1^2 q12​ q 1 2 , we recover flat entanglement spectrum characteristic of fixed-area states, in agreement with the primary state behavior. This provides a consistency check of the KdV-generalized ETH in 2d CFTs.
We describe a holographic approach to explicitly computing the universal logarithmic contributions to entanglement and Rényi entropies for free conformal scalar and spinor fields on even-dimensional spheres. This holographic derivation proceeds in two steps: first, following Casini and Huerta, a conformal mapping to thermal entropy in a hyperbolic geometry; then identification of the hyperbolic geometry with the conformal boundary of a bulk hyperbolic space and use of an AdS/CFT holographic formula to compute the resultant functional determinant. We explicitly verify the connection with the type-A trace anomaly for the entanglement entropy, whereas the Rényi entropy is computed with the aid of the Sommerfeld formula in order to deal with a conical defect. We show that as a by-product, the log coefficient of the Rényi entropy for round spheres can be efficiently obtained as the q-analog of a procedure similar to the one found by Cappelli and D’Appollonio that rendered the type-A trace anomaly.
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.