Entanglement in quantum impurity problems is non perturbative

TL;DR

This paper investigates the entanglement entropy near quantum impurities in one-dimensional systems, revealing non-perturbative behavior and demonstrating the effectiveness of form-factor methods in the gapless case.

Contribution

It introduces a non-perturbative analytical approach using form-factors for entanglement in gapless impurity problems, extending methods from boundary CFT and integrability.

Findings

Infrared divergences prevent perturbative expansion at small coupling

Large coupling expansion is more reliable due to boundary CFT and integrability

Form-factor approach accurately captures entanglement across distances in the resonant level model

Abstract

We study the entanglement entropy of a region of length 2L with the remainder of an infinite one dimensional gapless quantum system in the case where the region is centered on a quantum impurity. The coupling to this impurity is not scale invariant, and the physics involves a crossover between weak and strong coupling regimes. While the impurity contribution to the entanglement has been computed numerically in the past, little is known analytically about it, since in particular the methods of conformal invariance cannot be applied because of the presence of a crossover length. We show in this paper that the small coupling expansion of the entanglement entropy in this problem is quite generally plagued by strong infrared divergences, implying a non-perturbative dependence on the coupling. The large coupling expansion turns out to be better behaved, thanks to powerful results from the boundary CFT formulation and, in some cases, the underlying integrability of the problem. However, it is clear that this expansion does not capture well the crossover physics. In the integrable case -- which includes problems such as an XXZ chain with a modified link, the interacting resonant level model or the anisotropic Kondo model -- a non perturbative approach is in principle possible using form-factors. We adapt in this paper the ideas of [1,2] to the gapless case and show that, in the rather simple case of the resonant level model, and after some additional renormalizations, the form factors approach yields remarkably accurate results for the entanglement all the way from short to large distances. This is confirmed by detailed comparison with numerical simulations. Both our form factor and numerical results are compatible with a non-perturbative form at short distance.