Entanglement evolution across a conformal interface
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 to , where is the length of the subsystem , and 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 with , where 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.
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