Entanglement harvesting in conformal field theory

TL;DR

This paper explores how entanglement can be extracted from conformal field theories across various dimensions, revealing how operator properties and holographic dualities influence entanglement measures.

Contribution

It extends entanglement harvesting protocols to interacting conformal theories and arbitrary dimensions, providing new insights into the role of operator scaling and holography.

Findings

Increasing operator scaling dimension suppresses entanglement measures.

Holographic CFTs allow separation of field-harvested and communication-mediated entanglement.

Derived asymptotic formulas match numerical results well.

Abstract

We study entanglement harvesting in general $d$-dimensional conformal field theories using pointlike Unruh-DeWitt detectors coupled to scalar primary operators. This extends standard harvesting protocols beyond free fields to interacting conformal theories and arbitrary spatial dimensions. We find that increasing the operator scaling dimension suppresses both negativity and mutual information, reflecting the faster decay of correlations. For holographic CFTs, we show that bulk effective field theory enables a separation between field-harvested and communication-mediated entanglement. We also derive asymptotic, closed-form approximations that agree well with numerical results.