[NT/RBRC seminar] Gibbs entropy from entanglement in electric quenches

by Dr Adrien Florio (Stony Brook University)

Friday 27 Aug 2021, 09:00 → 11:00 US/Eastern

https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1606965084?pwd=TXZyYXVHdVMxMVBxd1RBWDArUE9MQT09

In quantum electrodynamics with charged chiral fermions, a background
electric field is the source of the chiral anomaly that can manifest
itself through the creation of a chirally imbalanced state of
fermions. This chiral state is realized through the production of
entangled pairs of right-moving fermions and left-moving antifermions
(or viceversa, depending on the orientation of the electric field).
In this talk, I will show that, at least without backreaction, the
thermodynamical Gibbs entropy associated with these pairs is equal to
the entropy of entanglement between the right-moving particles and
left-moving antiparticles. I will also discuss an asymptotic expansion
for the entanglement entropy in terms of the cumulants of the
multiplicity distribution of produced particles ("full counting
statistics"), and explain how to re-sum in practice this asymptotic expansion. I
will conclude by presenting a worked out example and study the time
dependence of the entanglement entropy in a specific time-dependent
pulsed background electric field, the so-called "Sauter pulse",
illustrate how our re-summation method works in this specific case and
find that short pulses (such as the ones created by high energy
collisions) result in an approximately thermal distribution for the
produced particles.