English

Reduced density matrix and internal dynamics for multicomponent regions

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-07-16 v3

Abstract

We find the density matrix corresponding to the vacuum state of a massless Dirac field in two dimensions reduced to a region of the space formed by several disjoint intervals. We calculate explicitly its spectral decomposition. The imaginary powers of the density matrix is a unitary operator implementing an internal time flow (the modular flow). We show that in the case of more than one interval this evolution is non-local, producing both, advance in the causal structure and "teleportation" between the disjoint intervals. However, it only mixes the fields on a finite number of trajectories, one for each interval. As an application of these results we compute the entanglement entropy for the massive multi-interval case in the small mass limit.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0903.5284,
  title  = {Reduced density matrix and internal dynamics for multicomponent regions},
  author = {H. Casini and M. Huerta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0903.5284},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

14 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T12:46:15.377Z