Flavor vacuum entanglement in boson mixing

Abstract

Mixing transformations in quantum field theory are non-trivial, since they are intimately related to the unitary inequivalence between Fock spaces for fields with definite mass and fields with definite flavor. Considering the superposition of two neutral scalar (spin-0) bosonic fields, we investigate some features of the emerging condensate structure of the flavor vacuum. In particular, we quantify the flavor vacuum entanglement in terms of the von Neumann entanglement entropy of the reduced state. Furthermore, in a suitable limit, we show that the flavor vacuum has a structure akin to the thermal vacuum of Thermo Field Dynamics, with a temperature dependent on both the mixing angle and the particle mass difference.