Area terms in entanglement entropy

TL;DR

This paper clarifies the relationship between different formulas for area terms in entanglement entropy, resolves ambiguities in stress tensor contributions, and applies these insights to free and interacting theories, including the F-theorem.

Contribution

It demonstrates the equivalence of recent and classical formulas for entanglement entropy area terms and addresses ambiguity issues in their computation.

Findings

Equivalence of Rosenhaus and Smolkin's formula with Adler-Zee's stress tensor correlator

Methods to fix ambiguities in stress tensor and boundary terms

Application of calculations to interacting theories and the F-theorem

Abstract

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.