No Arabic abstract
Understanding quantum entanglement in interacting higher-dimensional conformal field theories is a challenging task, as direct analytical calculations are often impossible to perform. With holographic entanglement entropy, calculations of entanglement entropy turn into a problem of finding extremal surfaces in a curved spacetime, which we tackle with a numerical finite-element approach. In this paper, we compute the entanglement entropy between two half-spaces resulting from a local quench, triggered by a local operator insertion in a CFT$_3$. We find that the growth of entanglement entropy at early time agrees with the prediction from the first law, as long as the conformal dimension $Delta$ of the local operator is small. Within the limited time region that we can probe numerically, we observe deviations from the first law and a transition to sub-linear growth at later time. In particular, the time dependence at large $Delta$ shows qualitative differences to the simple logarithmic time dependence familiar from the CFT$_2$ case. We hope that our work will motivate further studies, both numerical and analytical, on entanglement entropy in higher dimensions.
The Ryu-Takayanagi conjecture contradicts $1+1$-dimensional CFT if we apply it to two far disjoint intervals because it predicts the product state. Instead of the conventional conjecture, we propose a holographic entanglement entropy formula that the entanglement entropy of two disjoint intervals is described by the appropriate sum of the area of signed extremal curves. We confirm that the resulting holographic entanglement entropy is consistent with the entanglement entropy for the specific two disjoint intervals evaluated in the large $c$ limit CFT.
We present a new class of local quenches described by mixed states, parameterized universally by two parameters. We compute the evolutions of entanglement entropy for both a holographic and Dirac fermion CFT in two dimensions. This turns out to be equivalent to calculations of two point functions on a torus. We find that in holographic CFTs, the results coincide with the known results of pure state local operator quenches. On the other hand, we obtain new behaviors in the Dirac fermion CFT, which are missing in the pure state counterpart. By combining our results with the inequalities known for von-Neumann entropy, we obtain an upper bound of the pure state local operator quenches in the Dirac fermion CFT. We also explore predictions about the behaviors of entanglement entropy for more general mixed states.
We study holographic models related to global quantum quenches in finite size systems. The holographic set up describes naturally a CFT, which we consider on a circle and a sphere. The enhanced symmetry of the conformal group on the circle motivates us to compare the evolution in both cases. Depending on the initial conditions, the dual geometry exhibits oscillations that we holographically interpret as revivals of the initial field theory state. On the sphere, this only happens when the energy density created by the quench is small compared to the system size. However on the circle considerably larger energy densities are compatible with revivals. Two different timescales emerge in this latter case. A collapse time, when the system appears to have dephased, and the revival time, when after rephasing the initial state is partially recovered. The ratio of these two times depends upon the initial conditions in a similar way to what is observed in some experimental setups exhibiting collapse and revivals.
We consider the refinement of the holographic entanglement entropy for the holographic dual theories to the AdS solitons and AdS black holes, including the corrected ones by the Gauss-Bonnet term. The refinement is obtained by extracting the UV-independent piece of the holographic entanglement entropy, the so-called renormalized entanglement entropy which is independent of the choices of UV cutoff. Our main results are (i) the renormalized entanglement entropies of the AdS$_{d+1}$ soliton for $d=4,5$ are neither monotonically decreasing along the RG flow nor positive definite, especially around the deconfinement/confinement phase transition; (ii) there is no topological entanglement entropy for AdS$_5$ soliton even with Gauss-Bonnet correction; (iii) for the AdS black holes, the renormalized entanglement entropy obeys an expected volume law at IR regime, and the transition between UV and IR regimes is a smooth crossover even with Gauss-Bonnet correction; (iv) based on AdS/MERA conjecture, we postulate that the IR fixed-point state for the non-extremal AdS soliton is a trivial product state.
We investigate the holographic entanglement entropy of deformed conformal field theories which are dual to a cutoff AdS space. The holographic entanglement entropy evaluated on a three-dimensional Poincare AdS space with a finite cutoff can be reinterpreted as that of the dual field theory deformed by either a boost or $T bar{T}$ deformation. For the boost case, we show that, although it trivially acts on the underlying theory, it nontrivially affects the entanglement entropy due to the length contraction. For a three-dimensional AdS, we show that the effect of the boost transformation can be reinterpreted as the rescaling of the energy scale, similar to the $T bar{T}$ deformation. Under the boost and $T bar{T}$ deformation, the $c$-function of the entanglement entropy exactly shows the features expected by the Zamoldchikovs $c$-theorem. The deformed theory is always stationary at a UV fixed point and monotonically flows to another CFT in the IR fixed point. We also show that the holographic entanglement entropy in a Poincare cutoff AdS space can reproduce the exact same result of the $T bar{T}$ deformed theory on a two-dimensional sphere.