IR dynamics and entanglement entropy

TL;DR

This paper investigates the entanglement entropy between hard and soft particles in QED scattering, demonstrating it remains finite when soft photons are properly split and traced over, but diverges when considering the entire soft spectrum.

Contribution

It introduces a method to compute entanglement entropy in QED scattering that isolates infrared finite parts and analyzes divergence behavior.

Findings

Entanglement entropy is free of infrared divergences when soft photons in clouds are traced over.

Infrared divergences appear when tracing over the entire soft photon spectrum, including emitted radiation.

Divergences persist to all orders in perturbation theory in the infinite volume limit.

Abstract

We consider scattering of Faddeev-Kulish electrons in QED and study the entanglement between the hard and soft particles in the final state at the perturbative level. The soft photon spectrum naturally splits into two parts: i) soft photons with energies less than a characteristic infrared scale $E_d$ present in the clouds accompanying the asymptotic charged particles, and ii) sufficiently low energy photons with energies greater than $E_d$, comprising the soft part of the emitted radiation. We construct the density matrix associated with tracing over the radiative soft photons and calculate the entanglement entropy perturbatively. We find that the entanglement entropy is free of any infrared divergences order by order in perturbation theory. On the other hand infrared divergences in the perturbative expansion for the entanglement entropy appear upon tracing over the entire spectrum of soft photons, including those in the clouds. To leading order the entanglement entropy is set by the square of the Fock basis amplitude for real single soft photon emission, which leads to a logarithmic infrared divergence when integrated over the photon momentum. We argue that the infrared divergences in the entanglement entropy (per particle flux per unit time) in this latter case persist to all orders in perturbation theory in the infinite volume limit.