Theoretical Properties of Entropy in a Strong Coupling Region

TL;DR

This paper explores the properties of entropy, including thermal and entanglement entropy, in strongly coupled and topologically non-trivial quantum field theories, providing exact calculations and analyzing their implications for phase structure and invariance.

Contribution

It presents exact computations of thermal entropy at strong coupling, investigates topological effects on entropy, and discusses entanglement entropy invariance in two-dimensional conformal field theories.

Findings

Thermal entropy vanishes at infinite strong coupling with finite lattice spacing.

Topological terms influence the non-trivial entropy and topology can be inferred from entropy.

Universal entanglement entropy coefficient is independent of entangling surface choice in 2D CFT.

Abstract

Entropy is a quantity for counting physical degrees of freedom in a system. At a finite temperature, one can use thermal entropy to study thermodynamical properties. At zero temperature, entanglement entropy is expected to provide a suitable order parameter of a phase structure. Especially, the entanglement entropy exhibits an interesting codimension two area law in a strongly coupled conformal field theory. We compute thermal entropy in a non-relativistic model with an infinite fermion mass limit from an exact effective potential to obtain thermal entropy at an infinite strong coupling limit. The computational result provides vanishing thermal entropy at an infinite strong coupling limit with a finite lattice spacing. The non-trivial topological term can be included in the strongly coupled lattice system to obtain the non-trivial entropy and the topology can be marked from the entropy. We first compute the thermal entropy in a two dimensional lattice topological quantum field theory to study the lattice artifact and also argue that a theory possibly has translational invariance if a system does not have a volume law in the entanglement entropy. Finally, we show that a coefficient of a universal term of the entanglement entropy should not be affected by a choice of an entangling surface in two dimensional conformal field theory for one interval case. We also discuss a choice of the entangling surface in the entanglement entropy in two dimensional $\mathrm{CP}^{N-1}$ model at the large $N$ limit.