English

Entanglement evolution across a conformal interface

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2018-05-09 v4 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

For two dimensional conformal field theories in the ground state, it is known that a conformal interface along the entanglement cut can suppress the entanglement entropy from SAclogLS_A\sim c\log L to SAcefflogLS_A\sim c_{\text{eff}}\log L, where LL is the length of the subsystem AA, and ceff[0,c]c_{\text{eff}}\in [0, c] is the effective central charge which depends on the transmission property of the conformal interface. In this work, by making use of conformal mappings, we show that a conformal interface has the same effect on entanglement evolution in non-equilibrium cases, including global, local and certain inhomogeneous quantum quenches. I.e., a conformal interface suppresses the time evolution of entanglement entropy by effectively replacing the central charge cc with ceffc_{\text{eff}}, where ceffc_{\text{eff}} is exactly the same as that in the ground state case. We confirm this conclusion by a numerical study on a critical fermion chain. Furthermore, based on the quasi-particle picture, we conjecture that this conclusion holds for an arbitrary quantum quench in CFTs, as long as the initial state can be described by a regularized conformal boundary state.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.02126,
  title  = {Entanglement evolution across a conformal interface},
  author = {Xueda Wen and Yuxuan Wang and Shinsei Ryu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.02126},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

12 pages, 8 figures; v2&v3: refs added; v4: published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:37:49.640Z