Abstract
Employing a conformal map to hyperbolic space cross a circle, we compute the universal contribution to the vacuum entanglement entropy (EE) across a sphere in even-dimensional conformal field theory. Previous attempts to derive the EE in this way were hindered by a lack of knowledge of the appropriate boundary terms in the trace anomaly. In this paper we show that the universal part of the EE can be treated as a purely boundary effect. As a byproduct of our computation, we derive an explicit form for the A-type anomaly contribution to the Wess-Zumino term for the trace anomaly, now including boundary terms. In d = 4 and 6, these boundary terms generalize earlier bulk actions derived in the literature.
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Herzog, C.P., Huang, KW. & Jensen, K. Universal entanglement and boundary geometry in conformal field theory. J. High Energ. Phys. 2016, 162 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP01(2016)162
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP01(2016)162