Entanglement entropy and conformal bounds for $d=5$ CFTs
Abstract
The entanglement entropy of spacetime regions in odd-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) contains a universal constant term, . This quantity can be robustly defined by considering the mutual information of pairs of slightly deformed versions of . In the case of general three-dimensional CFTs, is positive definite and bounded below by the round disk result, . Additionally, strong evidence has been provided that for every region , is maximized, within the space of CFT's, by the free scalar field result. In this paper we show that while remains a local minimum around 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 CFT's. We argue that an analogous conjecture regarding the extremization of for general regions within the space of theories fails in . We instead analyze the viability of the weaker bound, , CFT for general small geometric deformations of the spherical entangling surface. This is equivalent to a general constraint involving the stress-tensor two-point function and the Euclidean partition function on the sphere, namely, , which we show to hold for all known CFT'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