English

The Quantum Null Energy Condition and Entanglement Entropy in Quenches

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-09-04 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

The Quantum Null Energy Condition (QNEC) relates energy to the second variation of entropy in relativistic quantum field theory. We use the QNEC inequality to bound entanglement entropy in quenches. At early times the entanglement entropy grows quadratically in time, and the QNEC provides an upper bound on the prefactor. We demonstrate that the bound is tight, by showing that it is saturated in certain quench protocols: boundary state quenches in conformal field theories in any dimensions. In higher than two dimensions we compute entanglement entropy using AdS/CFT. Our results are the first purely field theoretic applications of the QNEC.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.00919,
  title  = {The Quantum Null Energy Condition and Entanglement Entropy in Quenches},
  author = {Márk Mezei and Julio Virrueta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.00919},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

10 pages, 2 figures