Modular Hamiltonian Research Articles

Modular Hamiltonian for Excited States in Conformal Field Theory.

We present a novel replica trick that computes the relative entropy of two arbitrary states in conformal field theory. Our replica trick is based on the analytic continuation of partition functions that break the Z_{n} replica symmetry. It provides a method for computing arbitrary matrix elements of the modular Hamiltonian corresponding to excited states in terms of correlation functions. We show that the quantum Fisher information in vacuum can be expressed in terms of two-point functions on the replica geometry. We perform sample calculations in two-dimensional conformal field theories.

A stereoscopic look into the bulk

We present the foundation for a holographic dictionary with depth perception. The dictionary consists of natural CFT operators whose duals are simple, diffeomorphism-invariant bulk operators. The CFT operators of interest are the "OPE blocks," contributions to the OPE from a single conformal family. In holographic theories, we show that the OPE blocks are dual at leading order in 1/N to integrals of effective bulk fields along geodesics or homogeneous minimal surfaces in anti-de Sitter space. One widely studied example of an OPE block is the modular Hamiltonian, which is dual to the fluctuation in the area of a minimal surface. Thus, our operators pave the way for generalizing the Ryu-Takayanagi relation to other bulk fields. Although the OPE blocks are non-local operators in the CFT, they admit a simple geometric description as fields in kinematic space--the space of pairs of CFT points. We develop the tools for constructing local bulk operators in terms of these non-local objects. The OPE blocks also allow for conceptually clean and technically simple derivations of many results known in the literature, including linearized Einstein's equations and the relation between conformal blocks and geodesic Witten diagrams.

Relative entropy equals bulk relative entropy

We consider the gravity dual of the modular Hamiltonian associated to a general subregion of a boundary theory. We use it to argue that the relative entropy of nearby states is given by the relative entropy in the bulk, to leading order in the bulk gravitational coupling. We also argue that the boundary modular flow is dual to the bulk modular flow in the entanglement wedge, with implications for entanglement wedge reconstruction.

Thermodynamic law from the entanglement entropy bound

From black hole thermodynamics, the Bekenstein bound has been proposed as a universal thermal entropy bound. It has been further generalized to an entanglement entropy bound which is valid even in a quantum system. In a quantumly entangled system, the non-negativity of the relative entropy leads to the entanglement entropy bound. When the entanglement entropy bound is saturated, a quantum system satisfies the thermodynamics-like law with an appropriately defined entanglement temperature. We show that the saturation of the entanglement entropy bound accounts for a universal feature of the entanglement temperature proportional to the inverse of the system size. In addition, we show that the deformed modular Hamiltonian under a global quench also satisfies the generalized entanglement entropy boundary after introducing a new quantity called the entanglement chemical potential.

Natural approach to quantum dissipation

We introduce a class of Markovian quantum master equations, able to describe the dissipative dynamics of a quantum system weakly coupled to one or several heat baths. The dissipative structure is driven by an entropic operator, the so called modular Hamiltonian, which makes it nonlinear. The generated Modular Dynamical Semigroup (MDS) is not, in general, a Quantum Dynamical Semigroup (QDS), whose dynamics is of the popular Lindblad type. The MDS has a robust thermodynamic structure, which guarantees for the positivity of the time evolved state, the correct steady state properties, the positivity of the entropy production, a positive Onsager matrix and Onsager symmetry relations (arising from Green-Kubo formulas). We show that the celebrated Davies generator, obtained through the Born and the secular approximations, generates a MDS. By unravelling the modular structure of the former, we provide a different and genuinely nonlinear MDS, not of QDS type, which is free from the severe spectral restrictions of the Davies generator, while still being supported by a weak coupling limit argument. With respect to the latter, the present work is a substantial extension of \cite{Ottinger2011_GEO,Ottinger2010_TLS_DHO}

’t Hooft suppression and holographic entropy

Recent works have related the bulk first law of black hole mechanics to the first law of entanglement in a dual CFT. These are first order relations, and receive corrections for finite changes. In particular, the latter is naively expected to be accurate only for small changes in the quantum state. But when Newton’s constant is small relative to the AdS scale, the former holds to good approximation even for classical perturbations that contain many quanta. This suggests that — for appropriate states — corrections to the first law of entanglement are suppressed by powers of N in CFTs whose correlators satisfy ’t Hooft large-N power counting. We take first steps toward verifying that this is so by studying the large-N structure of the entropy of spatial regions for a class of CFT states motivate dby those created from the vacuum by acting with real-time single-trace sources. We show that 1/N counting matches bulk predictions, though we require the effect of the source on the modular hamiltonian to be non-singular. The magnitude of our sources is ϵN with ϵ fixed-but-small as N → ∞. Our results also provide a perturbative derivation — without relying on the replica trick — of the subleading Faulkner-Lewkowycz-Maldacena correction to the Ryu-Takayagi and Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi conjectures at all orders in 1/N .

Area terms in entanglement entropy

We discuss area terms in entanglement entropy and show that a recent formula by Rosenhaus and Smolkin is equivalent to the term involving a correlator of traces of the stress tensor in Adler-Zee formula for the renormalization of the Newton constant. We elaborate on how to fix the ambiguities in these formulas: Improving terms for the stress tensor of free fields, boundary terms in the modular Hamiltonian, and contact terms in the Euclidean correlation functions. We make computations for free fields and show how to apply these calculations to understand some results for interacting theories which have been studied in the literature. We also discuss an application to the F-theorem.

Entanglement entropy and duality in AdS4

Small variations of the entanglement entropy δS and the expectation value of the modular Hamiltonian δE are computed holographically for circular entangling curves in the boundary of AdS4, using gravitational perturbations with general boundary conditions in spherical coordinates. Agreement with the first law of thermodynamics, δS=δE, requires that the line element of the entangling curve remains constant. In this context, we also find a manifestation of electric–magnetic duality for the entanglement entropy and the corresponding modular Hamiltonian, following from the holographic energy–momentum/Cotton tensor duality.

Bulk emergence and the RG flow of entanglement entropy

We further develop perturbative methods used to calculate entanglement entropy (EE) away from an interacting CFT fixed point. At second order we find certain universal terms in the renormalized EE which were predicted previously from holography and which we find hold universally for relevant deformations of any CFT in any dimension. We use both replica methods and direct methods to calculate the EE and in both cases find a non-local integral expression involving the CFT two point function. We show that this integral expression can be written as a local integral over a higher dimensional \emph{bulk} modular hamiltonian in an emergent $AdS$ space-time. This bulk modular hamiltonian is associated to an emergent scalar field dual to the deforming operator. We generalize to arbitrary spatially dependent couplings where a linearized metric emerges naturally as a way of efficiently encoding the field theory entanglement: by demanding that Einstein's equations coupled to the bulk scalar field are satisfied, we show that EE can be calculated as the area of this metric. Not only does this show a direct emergence of a higher dimensional gravitational theory from any CFT, it allows for effective evaluation of the the integrals required to calculate EE perturbativly. Our results can also be interpreted as relating the non-locality of the modular hamiltonian for a spherical region in non-CFTs and the non-locality of the holographic bulk to boundary map.

Entropy on a null surface for interacting quantum field theories and the Bousso bound

We study the vacuum-subtracted von Neumann entropy of a segment on a null plane. We argue that for interacting quantum field theories in more than two dimensions, this entropy has a simple expression in terms of the expectation value of the null components of the stress tensor on the null interval. More explicitly $\Delta S = 2\pi \int d^{d-2}y \int_0^1 dx^+\, g(x^+)\, \langle T_{++}\rangle$, where $g(x^+)$ is a theory-dependent function. This function is constrained by general properties of quantum relative entropy. These constraints are enough to extend our recent free field proof of the quantum Bousso bound to the interacting case. This unusual expression for the entropy as the expectation value of an operator implies that the entropy is equal to the modular Hamiltonian, $\Delta S = \langle \Delta K \rangle $, where $K$ is the operator in the right hand side. We explain how this equality is compatible with a non-zero value for $\Delta S$. Finally, we also compute explicitly the function $g(x^+)$ for theories that have a gravity dual.

Rényi entropy, stationarity, and entanglement of the conformal scalar

We extend previous work on the perturbative expansion of the Renyi entropy, $S_q$, around $q=1$ for a spherical entangling surface in a general CFT. Applied to conformal scalar fields in various spacetime dimensions, the results appear to conflict with the known conformal scalar Renyi entropies. On the other hand, the perturbative results agree with known Renyi entropies in a variety of other theories, including theories of free fermions and vector fields and theories with Einstein gravity duals. We propose a resolution stemming from a careful consideration of boundary conditions near the entangling surface. This is equivalent to a proper treatment of total-derivative terms in the definition of the modular Hamiltonian. As a corollary, we are able to resolve an outstanding puzzle in the literature regarding the Renyi entropy of ${\cal N}=4$ super-Yang-Mills near $q=1$. A related puzzle regards the question of stationarity of the renormalized entanglement entropy (REE) across a circle for a (2+1)-dimensional massive scalar field. We point out that the boundary contributions to the modular Hamiltonian shed light on the previously-observed non-stationarity. Moreover, IR divergences appear in perturbation theory about the massless fixed point that inhibit our ability to reliably calculate the REE at small non-zero mass.

Universality in the geometric dependence of Rényi entropy

We derive several new results for Renyi entropy, $S_n$, across generic entangling surfaces. We establish a perturbative expansion of the Renyi entropy, valid in generic quantum field theories, in deformations of a given density matrix. When applied to even-dimensional conformal field theories, these results lead to new constraints on the $n$-dependence, independent of any perturbative expansion. In 4d CFTs, we show that the $n$-dependence of the universal part of the ground state Renyi entropy for entangling surfaces with vanishing extrinsic curvature contribution is in fact fully determined by the Renyi entropy across a sphere in flat space. Using holography, we thus provide the first computations of Renyi entropy across non-spherical entangling surfaces in strongly coupled 4d CFTs. Furthermore, we address the possibility that in a wide class of 4d CFTs, the flat space spherical Renyi entropy also fixes the $n$-dependence of the extrinsic curvature contribution, and hence that of arbitrary entangling surfaces. Our results have intriguing implications for the structure of generic modular Hamiltonians.

Relative entropy in higher spin holography

We examine relative entropy in the context of the higher-spin/CFT duality. We consider 3$d$ bulk configurations in higher spin gravity which are dual to the vacuum and a high temperature state of a CFT with $\mathcal{W}$-algebra symmetries in presence of a chemical potential for a higher spin current. The relative entropy between these states is then evaluated using the Wilson line functional for holographic entanglement entropy. In the limit of small entangling intervals, the relative entropy should vanish for a generic quantum system. We confirm this behaviour by showing that the difference in the expectation values of the modular Hamiltonian between the states matches with the difference in the entanglement entropy in the short-distance regime. Additionally, we compute the relative entropy of states corresponding to smooth solutions in the $SL(2,\mathbb{Z})$ family with respect to the vacuum.