Abstract
We would like to put the area law — believed to be obeyed by entanglement entropies in the ground state of a local field theory — to scrutiny in the presence of nonperturbative effects. We study instanton corrections to entanglement entropy in various models whose instanton contributions are well understood, including U(1) gauge theory in 2+1 dimensions and false vacuum decay in ϕ 4 theory, and we demonstrate that the area law is indeed obeyed in these models. We also perform numerical computations for toy wavefunctions mimicking the theta vacuum of the (1+1)-dimensional Schwinger model. Our results indicate that such superpositions exhibit no more violation of the area law than the logarithmic behavior of a single Fermi surface.
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ArXiv ePrint: 1703.01611
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Bhattacharyya, A., Hung, LY. & Melby-Thompson, C.M. Instantons and entanglement entropy. J. High Energ. Phys. 2017, 81 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2017)081
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2017)081