Universal Entanglement and Boundary Geometry in Conformal Field Theory
Abstract
Employing a conformal map to hyperbolic space cross a circle, we compute the universal contribution to the vacuum entanglement entropy (EE) across a sphere in even-dimensional conformal field theory. Previous attempts to derive the EE in this way were hindered by a lack of knowledge of the appropriate boundary terms in the trace anomaly. In this paper we show that the universal part of the EE can be treated as a purely boundary effect. As a byproduct of our computation, we derive an explicit form for the A-type anomaly contribution to the Wess-Zumino term for the trace anomaly, now including boundary terms. In d=4 and 6, these boundary terms generalize earlier bulk actions derived in the literature.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1510.00021,
title = {Universal Entanglement and Boundary Geometry in Conformal Field Theory},
author = {Christopher P. Herzog and Kuo-Wei Huang and Kristan Jensen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.00021},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
35 pages text plus 17 pages appendices and references, 3 figures; v2 package conflict resolved; v3 refs added, claim regarding newness of boundary central charge in d=4 removed, factor of 3 typo fixed