In this note we do the analysis of entanglement entropy more carefully when the non-conformal theory flows to a non-trivial IR fixed point. In particular we emphasize the role of the trace of the energy-momentum tensor in these calculations. We also compare the current technique for evaluating the entanglement entropy, particularly the Green's function method for gaussian theories, with the dilaton effective action approach and show that they compute identical quantities. As a result of this, the dilaton effective action approach can be thought of as an extension of Green's function technique to interacting theories.
The theory of Green's functions is briefly reviewed. It is discussed which properties of a quantum system and which physical processes can be described by Green's functions. A general approximation scheme to evaluate Green's functions and propagators is presented. Particular attention is paid to the one-particle Green's function and to the particle–particle propagator which is a relevant component of the two-particle Green's function. Several illustrative applications are presented and related to experiment.
We present an efficient basis for imaginary time Green's functions based on a low-rank decomposition of the spectral Lehmann representation. The basis functions are simply a set of well-chosen exponentials, so the corresponding expansion may be thought of as a discrete form of the Lehmann representation using an effective spectral density which is a sum of $\ensuremath{\delta}$ functions. The basis is determined only by an upper bound on the product $\ensuremath{\beta}{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{max}$, with $\ensuremath{\beta}$ the inverse temperature and ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{max}$ an energy cutoff, and a user-defined error tolerance $\ensuremath{\epsilon}$. The number
r of basis functions scales as $O(log(\ensuremath{\beta}{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{max})log(1/\ensuremath{\epsilon}))$. The discrete Lehmann representation of a particular imaginary time Green's function can be recovered by interpolation at a set of
r imaginary time nodes. Both the basis functions and the interpolation nodes can be obtained rapidly using standard numerical linear algebra routines. Due to the simple form of the basis, the discrete Lehmann representation of a Green's function can be explicitly transformed to the Matsubara frequency domain, or obtained directly by interpolation on a Matsubara frequency grid. We benchmark the efficiency of the representation on simple cases, and with a high-precision solution of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev equation at low temperature. We compare our approach with the related intermediate representation method, and introduce an improved algorithm to build the intermediate representation basis and a corresponding sampling grid.