Entanglement Entropy of Coupled Conformal Field Theories and Fermi Liquids

Abstract

In this paper we calculate the entanglement entropy of two coupled gapless systems in general spatial dimension d. The gapless systems can be either conformal field theories (CFT), or Fermi liquids. We assume the two systems are coupled uniformly in a h-dimensional submanifold of the space, with 0 <= h <= d. We will focus on the scaling of the entanglement entropy with the size of the system, and its scaling with the inter-system coupling constant g. Three approaches will be used for our calculation: (1) exact calculation with ground state wave-functional, (2) perturbative calculation with functional path integral, (3) scaling argument.