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Irreversibility of the RG flow in quantum field theories with boundaries.

Seminar

Specialist level

Speaker:

Ignacio Salazar Landea

Institution:

Instituto de Física La Plata (Argentina)

Location&Place:

IFT Seminar Room/Red Room

Abstract:

We study conformal field theories with boundaries, and their boundary renormalization group (RG) flows, using methods from quantum information theory. Positivity of the relative entropy, together with unitarity and Lorentz invariance, give rise to bounds that characterize the irreversibility of such flows. In 1+1 dimensions we give an entropic prove the well known g-theorem -the decrease of the boundary entropy along a boundary RG flow. In 2+ 1 dimensions, we prove the entropic b-theorem -the decrease of the two-dimensional Weyl anomaly under boundary RG flows. In higher dimensions, the bound implies that the leading area coefficient of the entanglement entropy induced by the defect decreases along the flow.