Universality of Corner Entanglement in Conformal Field Theories

We study the contribution to the entanglement entropy of (2+1)-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) coming from a sharp corner in the entangling surface. This contribution is encoded in a function a(θ) of the corner opening angle, and was recently proposed as a measure of the degrees of freed...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review letters 2015-07, Vol.115 (2), p.021602-021602, Article 021602
Main Authors: Bueno, Pablo, Myers, Robert C, Witczak-Krempa, William
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Corners
Degrees of freedom
Entanglement
Fermions
Field theory
Mathematical analysis
Scalars
Three dimensional
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Summary:We study the contribution to the entanglement entropy of (2+1)-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) coming from a sharp corner in the entangling surface. This contribution is encoded in a function a(θ) of the corner opening angle, and was recently proposed as a measure of the degrees of freedom in the underlying CFT. We show that the ratio a(θ)/C(T), where C(T) is the central charge in the stress tensor correlator, is an almost universal quantity for a broad class of theories including various higher-curvature holographic models, free scalars, and fermions, and Wilson-Fisher fixed points of the O(N) models with N=1,2,3. Strikingly, the agreement between these different theories becomes exact in the limit θ→π, where the entangling surface approaches a smooth curve. We thus conjecture that the corresponding ratio is universal for general CFTs in three dimensions.
ISSN:0031-9007
1079-7114
DOI:10.1103/physrevlett.115.021602