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Anomalies of the Entanglement Entropy in Chiral Theories

Iqbal, Nabil; Wall, Aron C.

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Authors

Aron C. Wall



Abstract

We study entanglement entropy in theories with gravitational or mixed U(1) gauge-gravitational anomalies in two, four and six dimensions. In such theories there is an anomaly in the entanglement entropy: it depends on the choice of reference frame in which the theory is regulated. We discuss subtleties regarding regulators and entanglement entropies in anomalous theories. We then study the entanglement entropy of free chiral fermions and self-dual bosons and show that in sufficiently symmetric situations this entanglement anomaly comes from an imbalance in the flux of modes flowing through the boundary, controlled by familiar index theorems. In two and four dimensions we use anomalous Ward identities to find general expressions for the transformation of the entanglement entropy under a diffeomorphism. (In the case of a mixed anomaly there is an alternative presentation of the theory in which the entanglement entropy is not invariant under a U(1) gauge transformation. The free-field manifestation of this phenomenon involves a novel kind of fermion zero mode on a gravitational background with a twist in the normal bundle to the entangling surface.) We also study d-dimensional anomalous systems as the boundaries of d+1 dimensional gapped Hall phases. Here the full system is non-anomalous, but the boundary anomaly manifests itself in a change in the entanglement entropy when the boundary metric is sheared relative to the bulk.

Citation

Iqbal, N., & Wall, A. C. (2016). Anomalies of the Entanglement Entropy in Chiral Theories. Journal of High Energy Physics, 10, Article 111. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep10%282016%29111

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 11, 2016
Online Publication Date Oct 20, 2016
Publication Date Oct 20, 2016
Deposit Date Jan 26, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Journal of High Energy Physics
Print ISSN 1126-6708
Publisher Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 10
Article Number 111
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep10%282016%29111

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Open Access, © The Authors. Article funded by SCOAP3. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.





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