Entanglement Entropy of Massive Scalar Fields: Mass Suppression, Violation of Universal mR Scaling, and Implications for Black Hole Thermodynamics

TL;DR

This paper studies how mass and excitation states affect entanglement entropy in scalar fields, revealing mass suppression, scaling violations, and implications for black hole thermodynamics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed numerical analysis of entanglement entropy dependence on mass and excitation states, highlighting the breakdown of universal scaling in excited states.

Findings

Entanglement entropy is exponentially suppressed by mass in the ground state.

Universal mR scaling is violated in localized excited states.

Multiple infrared scales influence entanglement in massive quantum fields.

Abstract

We investigate the entanglement entropy of a massive scalar field using the spherical shell lattice model introduced by Das and Shankaranarayanan. A systematic numerical analysis is performed to study the dependence of the entropy on the field mass and on the size of the entangling region for both ground and excited states. For the ground state, we find that the entanglement entropy is exponentially suppressed by the field mass, reflecting the presence of a finite correlation length, while the geometric area-law scaling remains robust for all masses. For localized excited states, however, we uncover a qualitatively different behavior. The excess entropy does not exhibit universal scaling in the dimensionless variable mR. Instead, numerical results show that data points with identical mR but different (m,R) pairs do not collapse onto a single curve, demonstrating a clear violation of simple scaling. This breakdown is traced to the presence of an additional length scale associated with the finite width of the wave-packet excitation. This result identifies the coexistence of multiple infrared scales as a key feature of excited-state entanglement in massive quantum field theories. Mutual information provides an additional finite diagnostic of correlations in the chosen nested geometry. The numerical results show a strong dependence on the field mass, although the detailed behavior is sensitive to the geometric setup used in the calculation. These findings clarify how particle mass and excitation structure jointly determine entanglement properties, and suggest that the matter contribution to the generalized entropy in semiclassical gravity may depend on independent infrared parameters rather than on a single correlation scale. Implications for black hole entropy and the island formula are briefly discussed.