Vacuum Structure and Boundary Renormalization Group

Abstract

The vacuum structure is probed by boundary conditions. The behaviour of thermodynamical quantities like free energy, boundary entropy and entanglement entropy under the boundary renormalization group flow are analysed in 2D conformal field theories. The results show that whereas vacuum energy and boundary entropy turn out to be very sensitive to boundary conditions, the vacuum entanglement entropy is independent of boundary properties when the boundary of the entanglement domain does not overlap the boundary of the physical space. In all cases the second law of thermodynamics holds along the boundary renormalization group flow.