Entanglement Entropy in a Holographic Kondo Model

TL;DR

This paper uses holographic duality to study entanglement and impurity entropy in a Kondo model, revealing how impurity screening and RG flow affect the bulk geometry and entropy, consistent with field theory results.

Contribution

It provides a holographic calculation of impurity entropy in a Kondo model, demonstrating the geometric realization of RG flow and impurity screening.

Findings

Impurity entropy decreases with scalar condensate growth.

The holographic model satisfies the g-theorem.

Results agree with previous free electron field theory calculations.

Abstract

We calculate entanglement and impurity entropies in a recent holographic model of a magnetic impurity interacting with a strongly coupled system. There is an RG flow to an IR fixed point where the impurity is screened, leading to a decrease in impurity degrees of freedom. This information loss corresponds to a volume decrease in our dual gravity model, which consists of a codimension one hypersurface embedded in a BTZ black hole background in three dimensions. There are matter fields defined on this hypersurface which are dual to Kondo field theory operators. In the large N limit, the formation of the Kondo cloud corresponds to the condensation of a scalar field. The entropy is calculated according to the Ryu-Takayanagi prescription. This requires to determine the backreaction of the hypersurface on the BTZ geometry, which is achieved by solving the Israel junction conditions. We find that the larger the scalar condensate gets, the more the volume of constant time slices in the bulk is reduced, shortening the bulk geodesics and reducing the impurity entropy. This provides a new non-trivial example of an RG flow satisfying the g-theorem. Moreover, we find explicit expressions for the impurity entropy which are in agreement with previous field theory results for free electrons. This demonstrates the universality of perturbing about an IR fixed point.