# Subsystem eigenstate thermalization hypothesis for entanglement entropy in CFT

## TL;DR

This paper examines the subsystem eigenstate thermalization hypothesis in 2D conformal field theories by analyzing entanglement entropy and relative entropy, revealing nontrivial eighth-order effects and their implications for thermalization at large central charge.

## Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of subsystem ETH in large central charge CFTs, including high-order corrections to entanglement entropy and bounds on state distinguishability.

## Key findings

- Eighth-order corrections in short interval expansion are nontrivial.
- Relative entropy indicates unsuppressed differences at large central charge.
- Trace distance bounds support weak ETH with power-law suppression.

## Abstract

We investigate a weak version of subsystem eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) for a two-dimensional large central charge conformal field theory by comparing the local equivalence of high energy state and thermal state of canonical ensemble. We evaluate the single-interval R\'enyi entropy and entanglement entropy for a heavy primary state in short interval expansion. We verify the results of R\'enyi entropy by two different replica methods. We find nontrivial results at the eighth order of short interval expansion, which include an infinite number of higher order terms in the large central charge expansion. We then evaluate the relative entropy of the reduced density matrices to measure the difference between the heavy primary state and thermal state of canonical ensemble, and find that the aforementioned nontrivial eighth order results make the relative entropy unsuppressed in the large central charge limit. By using Pinsker's and Fannes-Audenaert inequalities, we can exploit the results of relative entropy to yield the lower and upper bounds on trace distance of the excited-state and thermal-state reduced density matrices. Our results are consistent with subsystem weak ETH, which requires the above trace distance is of power-law suppression by the large central charge. However, we are unable to pin down the exponent of power-law suppression. As a byproduct we also calculate the relative entropy to measure the difference between the reduced density matrices of two different heavy primary states.