Power-law corrections to entanglement entropy of horizons

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Date
2015-12-22
Authors
Das, Saurya
Shankaranarayanan, S.
Sur, Sourav
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Abstract
We re-examine the idea that the origin of black-hole entropy may lie in the entanglement of quantum fields between inside and outside of the horizon. Motivated by the observation that certain modes of gravitational fluctuations in a black-hole background behave as scalar fields, we compute the entanglement entropy of such a field, by tracing over its degrees of freedom inside a sphere. We show that while this entropy is proportional to the area of the sphere when the field is in its ground state, a correction term proportional to a fractional power of area results when the field is in a superposition of ground and excited states. The area law is thus recovered for large areas. Further, we identify location of the degrees of freedom that give rise to the above entropy.
Description
Sherpa Romeo green journal. Permission to archive final published version.
Keywords
Black-hole , Entropy , Entanglement entropy , Degrees of freedom , Scalar fields
Citation
Das, S., Shankaranarayanan, S., & Sur, S. (2008). Power-law corrections to entanglement entropy of horizons. Physical Review D, 77(6), 064013. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.77.064013
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