Published November 2023 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Symmetry-resolved entanglement entropy, spectra & boundary conformal field theory

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon RIKEN
  • 3. ROR icon Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe

Abstract

We perform a comprehensive analysis of the symmetry-resolved (SR) entanglement entropy (EE) for one single interval in the ground state of a 1 + 1D conformal field theory (CFT), that is invariant under an arbitrary finite or compact Lie group, G. We utilize the boundary CFT approach to study the total EE, which enables us to find the universal leading order behavior of the SREE and its first correction, which explicitly depends on the irreducible representation under consideration and breaks the equipartition of entanglement. We present two distinct schemes to carry out these computations. The first relies on the evaluation of the charged moments of the reduced density matrix. This involves studying the action of the defect-line, that generates the symmetry, on the boundary states of the theory. This perspective also paves the way for discussing the infeasibility of studying symmetry resolution when an anomalous symmetry is present. The second scheme draws a parallel between the SREE and the partition function of an orbifold CFT. This approach allows for the direct computation of the SREE without the need to use charged moments. From this standpoint, the infeasibility of defining the symmetry-resolved EE for an anomalous symmetry arises from the obstruction to gauging. Finally, we derive the symmetry-resolved entanglement spectra for a CFT invariant under a finite symmetry group. We revisit a similar problem for CFT with compact Lie group, explicitly deriving an improved formula for U(1) resolved entanglement spectra. Using the Tauberian formalism, we can estimate the aforementioned EE spectra rigorously by proving an optimal lower and upper bound on the same. In the abelian case, we perform numerical checks on the bound and find perfect agreement.

Copyright and License

⃝© 2025 The Authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Article funded by SCOAP3.

 

Acknowledgement

We thank Filiberto Ares, Pasquale Calabrese, Giuseppe Di Giulio, Michele Fossati, Kantaro Ohmori, Brandon Rayhaun, Shu-Heng Shao, Yuji Tachikawa, and Yijian Zou for useful discussions and comments on the draft. The work by YK, HO, and SP is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award Number DE-SC0011632. In addition, YK is supported by the Brinson Prize Fellowship at Caltech. HO is supported in part by the Simons Investigator Award (MP-SIP-00005259), the World Premier International Research Center Initiative, MEXT, Japan, and JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research 20K03965 and 23K03379. SP is supported in part by the Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Fellowship at Caltech. SM thanks support from Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter and the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech. This work was performed in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by NSF grant PHY-1607611.

 

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2309.03287 (arXiv)

Funding

United States Department of Energy
DE-SC0011632
California Institute of Technology
Brinson Prize Fellowship -
Simons Foundation
MP-SIP-00005259
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
20K03965
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
23K03379
Sherman Fairchild Foundation
National Science Foundation
PHY-1607611
SCOAP3

Dates

Accepted
2023-11-18
Available
2023-11-29
Published

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Published