1206.3092 (Pasquale Calabrese et al.)

Entanglement negativity in quantum field theory    [PDF]

Pasquale Calabrese, John Cardy, Erik Tonni

We develop a systematic method to extract the negativity in the ground state of a 1+1 dimensional relativistic quantum field theory, using a path integral formalism to construct the partial transpose \rho_A^{T_2} of the reduced density matrix of a subsystem A=A_1\cup A_2, and introducing a replica approach to obtain its trace norm which gives the logarithmic negativity {\cal E}=\log||\rho_A^{T_2}||. This is shown to reproduce standard results for a pure state. We then apply this method to conformal field theories, deriving the result {\cal E}\sim(c/4)\ln(\ell_1\ell_2/(\ell_1+\ell_2)) for the case of two adjacent intervals of lengths \ell_1,\ell_2 in an infinite system, where c is the central charge. For two disjoint intervals it depends only on the harmonic ratio of the four end points and so is manifestly scale invariant. We check our findings against exact numerical results in the harmonic chain.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.3092