English

Entanglement entropy and conformal bounds for $d=5$ CFTs

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-04-03 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

The entanglement entropy of spacetime regions AA in odd-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) contains a universal constant term, (1)d12F(A)(-1)^{\frac{d-1}{2}}F(A). This quantity can be robustly defined by considering the mutual information of pairs of slightly deformed versions of AA. In the case of general three-dimensional CFTs, F(A)F(A) is positive definite and bounded below by the round disk result, F(A)F0F(A=S1)F(A)\geq F_0\equiv F(\partial A=\mathbb{S}^1). Additionally, strong evidence has been provided that for every region AA, F(A)/F0F(A)/F_0 is maximized, within the space of CFT3_3's, by the free scalar field result. In this paper we show that while F(A)F(A) remains a local minimum around F0F(A=S3)F_0\equiv F(\partial A=\mathbb{S}^3) for small deformations of the spherical entangling surface, it can take values of arbitrarily large magnitude with either sign for more general regions, and hence it is neither upper- nor lower-bounded in general CFT5_5's. We argue that an analogous conjecture regarding the extremization of F(A)/F0F(A)/F_0 for general regions within the space of theories fails in d=5d=5. We instead analyze the viability of the weaker bound, Fϵ/F0[Fϵ/F0]free scalarF_{\epsilon}/F_0\leq \left[F_{\epsilon}/F_0\right]_{\text{free scalar}}, \forallCFT5_5 for general small geometric deformations of the spherical entangling surface. This is equivalent to a general constraint involving the stress-tensor two-point function CTC_T and the Euclidean partition function on the sphere, namely, CT/F0[CT/F0] free scalar0.314C_T/F_0\leq \left[C_T/F_0\right]_{\text{ free scalar}}\approx 0.314, which we show to hold for all known CFT5_5's. We also comment on possible extensions of this result to higher dimensions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.01436,
  title  = {Entanglement entropy and conformal bounds for $d=5$ CFTs},
  author = {Pablo Bueno and Adam Fernández García and Francesco Gentile and Oscar Lasso Andino and Javier Moreno},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.01436},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

61 pages, 7 figures