Conformal Anomaly Matching and Exact Results for Entanglement Entropy

Entanglement entropy is a useful quantity for various purposes. It
finds applications in many areas of physics starting from black holes
to quantum phase transition. At the same time it is also a notoriously
difficult thing to compute in quantum field theories. Many exact
results are known for conformal field theories in two and higher
dimensions. The situation is not so good for general non-conformal
field theories. Some exact results are known for non-critical models
in two dimensions, but similar results do not exist for general higher
dimensional theories.

It turns out that some field theory techniques developed recently [3,
4] to study renormalization group flow in even dimensional quantum
field theories can be used effectively to compute the entanglement
entropy of even dimensional non-conformal field theories [1, 2].  This
will lead to some exact results for higher dimensional theories which
in particular limits match the known results. In this talk some of
these results will be explained.

References:

1. S. Banerjee, ``Trace Anomaly Matching and Exact Results For
   Entanglement Entropy,'' arXiv:1405.4876 [hep-th]. 
2. S. Banerjee, ``Note On The Dilaton Effective Action And
   Entanglement Entropy'', arXiv:1406.3038 [hep-th]. 
3. Z. Komargodski and A. Schwimmer, ``On Renormalization Group Flows
   in Four Dimensions,'' JHEP 1112, 099 (2011) [arXiv:1107.3987  [hep-th]].
4. Z. Komargodski, ``The Constraints of Conformal Symmetry on RG
   Flows,'' JHEP 1207, 069 (2012)[arXiv:1112.4538 [hep-th]].