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Phys. Rev. B 79, 115421 (2009) [13 pages]

Universal entanglement entropy in two-dimensional conformal quantum critical points

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Benjamin Hsu1, Michael Mulligan2, Eduardo Fradkin1, and Eun-Ah Kim3
1Department of Physics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois 61801-3080, USA
2Department of Physics and SLAC, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
3Department of Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA

Received 2 December 2008; published 16 March 2009

We study the scaling behavior of the entanglement entropy of two-dimensional conformal quantum critical systems, i.e., systems with scale-invariant wave functions. They include two-dimensional generalized quantum dimer models on bipartite lattices and quantum loop models, as well as the quantum Lifshitz model and related gauge theories. We show that under quite general conditions, the entanglement entropy of a large and simply connected subsystem of an infinite system with a smooth boundary has a universal finite contribution, as well as scale-invariant terms for special geometries. The universal finite contribution to the entanglement entropy is computable in terms of the properties of the conformal structure of the wave function of these quantum critical systems. The calculation of the universal term reduces to a problem in boundary conformal field theory

© 2009 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.79.115421
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevB.79.115421
PACS:
03.67.Mn, 11.25.Hf