Entanglement with Centers

TL;DR

This paper explores the properties of entanglement entropy with centers, proposing methods to compute it from Hamiltonian and Lagrangian formulations, and applies these to gauge theories and duality structures.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic approach to compute entanglement entropy with centers using Hamiltonian and Lagrangian methods, and reveals duality structures in massless p-form theories.

Findings

Entanglement entropy with centers can be computed from Hamiltonian formulations.

Duality structures in p-form theories connect centers in ground states.

Spatial area terms in gauge theories are obtained via strong coupling expansion.

Abstract

Entanglement is a physical phenomenon that each state cannot be described individually. Entanglement entropy gives quantitative understanding to the entanglement. We use decomposition of the Hilbert space to discuss properties of the entanglement. Therefore, partial trace operator becomes important to define the reduced density matrix from different centers, which commutes with all elements in the Hilbert space, corresponding to different entanglement choices or different observations on entangling surface. Entanglement entropy is expected to satisfy the strong subadditivity. We discuss decomposition of the Hilbert space for the strong subadditivity and other related inequalities. The entanglement entropy with centers can be computed from the Hamitonian formulations systematically, provided that we know wavefunctional. In the Hamitonian formulation, it is easier to obtain symmetry structure. We consider massless $p$-form theory as an example. The massless $p$-form theory in ($2p+2)$-dimensions has global symmetry, similar to the electric-magnetic duality, connecting centers in ground state. This defines a duality structure in centers. Because it is hard to exactly compute the entanglement entropy from partial trace operator, we propose the Lagrangian formulation from the Hamitonian formulation to compute the entanglement entropy with centers. From the Lagrangian method and saddle point approximation, the codimension two surface term (leading order) in the Einstein gravity theory or holographic entanglement entropy should correspond to non-tensor product decomposition (center is not identity). Finally, we compute the entanglement entropy of the $SU(N)$ Yang-Mills lattice gauge theory in the fundamental representation using the strong coupling expansion in the extended lattice model to obtain spatial area term in total dimensions larger than two for $N>1$.