Holographic entanglement entropy of local quenches in AdS4/CFT3: a finite-element approach

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 CFT3. 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 Δ 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 Δ shows qualitative differences to the simple logarithmic time dependence familiar from the CFT2 case. We hope that our work will motivate further studies, both numerical and analytical, on entanglement entropy in higher dimensions.