English

Operator content of real-space entanglement spectra at conformal critical points

Statistical Mechanics 2013-03-05 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory Quantum Physics

Abstract

We provide numerical evidence that the low-lying part of the entanglement spectrum of a real-space block (i.e. a single interval) of a one-dimensional quantum many body system at a conformal critical point corresponds to the energy spectrum of a boundary conformal field theory (CFT). This correspondence allows to uncover a subset of the operator content of a conformal field theory by inspection of the entanglement spectrum of a single wave function, thus providing important information on a CFT beyond its central charge. As a practical application we show that for many systems described by a compactified boson CFT, one can infer the compactification radius (governing e.g. the power law decay of correlation functions) of the theory in a simple way based on the entanglement spectrum.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1303.0741,
  title  = {Operator content of real-space entanglement spectra at conformal critical points},
  author = {Andreas M. Läuchli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.0741},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

6 pages, 5 figures