Rényi entropy and negativity for massless Dirac fermions at conformal interfaces and junctions

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the ground state of a (1+1)-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) built with M species of massless free Dirac fermions coupled at one boundary point via a conformal junction/interface. Each CFT represents a wire of finite length L. We develop a systematic strategy to compute the Rényi entropies for a generic bipartition between the wires and the entanglement negativity between two non-complementary sets of wires. Both these entanglement measures turn out to grow logarithmically with L with an exactly calculated universal prefactor depending on the details of the junction and of the bipartition. These analytic predictions are tested numerically for junctions of free Fermi gases, finding perfect agreement.

Keywords

• Boundary Quantum Field Theory
• Correlation Functions
• Field Theories in Lower Dimensions