Entanglement and complexity of purification in (1+1)-dimensional free conformal field theories

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

  • Hugo A. Camargo
  • Lucas Hackl
  • Michal P. Heller
  • Alexander Jahn
  • Tadashi Takayanagi
  • Bennet Windt

Finding pure states in an enlarged Hilbert space that encode the mixed state of a quantum field theory as a partial trace is necessarily a challenging task. Nevertheless, such purifications play the key role in characterizing quantum information-theoretic properties of mixed states via entanglement and complexity of purifications. In this article, we analyze these quantities for two intervals in the vacuum of free bosonic and Ising conformal field theories using the most general Gaussian purifications. We provide a comprehensive comparison with existing results and identify universal properties. We further discuss important subtleties in our setup: the massless limit of the free bosonic theory and the corresponding behavior of the mutual information, as well as the Hilbert space structure under the Jordan-Wigner mapping in the spin chain model of the Ising conformal field theory.

Original languageEnglish
Article number013248
JournalPhysical Review Research
Volume3
Issue number1
ISSN2643-1564
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Mar 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 authors.

ID: 284295378