Evolution operators in conformal field theories and conformal mappings: the entanglement Hamiltonian, the sine-square deformation, and others

Abstract

By making use of conformal mapping, we construct various time-evolution operators in (1+1) dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs), which take the form $\int dx\, f(x) \mathcal{H}(x)$, where $\mathcal{H}(x)$ is the Hamiltonian density of the CFT, and $f(x)$ is an envelope function. Examples of such deformed evolution operators include the entanglement Hamiltonian, and the so-called sine-square deformation of the CFT. Within our construction, the spectrum and the (finite-size) scaling of the level spacing of the deformed evolution operator are known exactly. Based on our construction, we also propose a regularized version of the sine-square deformation, which, in contrast to the original sine-square deformation, has the spectrum of the CFT defined on a spatial circle of finite circumference $L$, and for which the level spacing scales as $1/L^2$, once the circumference of the circle and the regularization parameter are suitably adjusted.