An inverse mass expansion for entanglement entropy in free massive scalar field theory

Abstract

Abstract We extend the entanglement entropy calculation performed in the seminal paper by Srednicki (Phys Rev Lett 71:666, 1993) for free real massive scalar field theories in $$1+1$$ 1+1 , $$2+1$$ 2+1 and $$3+1$$ 3+1 dimensions. We show that the inverse of the scalar field mass can be used as an expansion parameter for a perturbative calculation of the entanglement entropy. We perform the calculation for the ground state of the system and for a spherical entangling surface at third order in the inverse mass expansion. The calculated entanglement entropy contains a leading area law term, as well as subleading terms that depend on the regularization scheme, as expected. Universal terms are non-perturbative effects in this approach. Interestingly, this perturbative expansion can be used to approximate the coefficient of the area law term, even in the case of a massless scalar field in $$2+1$$ 2+1 and $$3+1$$ 3+1 dimensions. The presented method provides the spectrum of the reduced density matrix as an intermediate result, which is an important advantage in comparison to the replica trick approach. Our perturbative expansion underlines the relation between the area law and the locality of the underlying field theory.