2018/08/17 by Jennifer Lin, Lin, Jennifer, Djordje Radicevic +1 · 7 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Other Condensed Matter (cond-mat.other) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum many-body systems #cond-mat.other #hep-lat #hep-th #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1808.05939
49 pages. v2: added references
openalex publication_date 2018/08/17 · arxiv created 2018/09/16 · arxiv updated 2018/09/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We revisit the issue of defining the entropy of a spatial region in a broad class of quantum theories. In theories with explicit regularizations, working within an elementary but general algebraic framework applicable to matter and gauge theories alike, we give precise path integral expressions for three known types of entanglement entropy that we call full, distillable, and gauge-invariant. For a class of gauge theories that do not necessarily have a regularization in our framework, including Chern-Simons theory, we describe a related approach to defining entropies based on locally extending the Hilbert space at the entangling edge, and we discuss its connections to other calculational prescriptions. Based on results from both approaches, we conjecture that it is always the full entanglement entropy that is calculated by standard holographic techniques in strongly coupled conformal theories.