English

Long-distance N-partite information for fermionic CFTs

High Energy Physics - Theory 2024-09-09 v1

Abstract

The mutual information, I2I_2, of general spacetime regions is expected to capture the full data of any conformal field theory (CFT). For spherical regions, this data can be accessed from long-distance expansions of the mutual information of pairs of regions as well as of suitably chosen linear combinations of mutual informations involving more than two regions and their unions -- namely, the NN-partite information, INI_N. In particular, the leading term in the I2I_2 long-distance expansion is fully determined by the spin and conformal dimension of the lowest-dimensional primary of the theory. When the operator is a scalar, an analogous formula for the tripartite information I3I_3 contains information about the OPE coefficient controlling the fusion of such operator into its conformal family. When it is a fermionic field, the coefficient of the leading term in I3I_3 vanishes instead. In this paper we present an explicit general formula for the long-distance four-partite information I4I_4 of general CFTs whose lowest-dimensional operator is a fermion ψ\psi. The result involves a combination of four-point and two-point functions of ψ\psi and ψˉ\bar{\psi} evaluated at the locations of the regions. We perform explicit checks of the formula for a (2+1)(2+1)-dimensional free fermion in the lattice finding perfect agreement. The generalization of our result to the NN-partite information (for arbitrary NN) is also discussed. Similarly to I3I_3, we argue that I5I_5 vanishes identically at leading order for general fermionic theories, while the INI_N with N=7,9,N=7,9, \dots only vanish when the theory is free.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.03821,
  title  = {Long-distance N-partite information for fermionic CFTs},
  author = {César A. Agón and Pablo Bueno and Guido van der Velde},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.03821},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:35:47.316Z