Geometric Rényi mutual information induced by localized particle excitations in quantum field theory

Abstract

Quantum field theory exhibits rich spatial correlation structures even in the vacuum, where entanglement entropy between regions scales with the area of their shared boundary. While this vacuum structure has been extensively studied, far less is understood about how localized wave packets influence correlations between field values in different spatial regions. In this work, we use the Schrödinger representation to study the Rényi mutual information between complementary spatial regions for a localized wave packet of a free massless scalar field in $(d+1)$ dimensions. We find that the mutual information in this excited state includes both a vacuum term and an excitation-induced contribution. To obtain quantitative results, we specialize to $1+1$ dimensions and evaluate the Rényi-2 mutual information between the negative and positive halves of the real line. We find that the excitation generates finite, positive correlations that are maximized when the wave packet sits at the boundary and decrease with its distance from it, at a rate determined by the wave packet's width.Our findings constitute a contribution toward a more comprehensive understanding of quantum correlations in multiparticle states with nontrivial spatial localization, analyzed within a quantum field-theoretical framework.

Revised version. Published in Physical Review D

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