Defect entanglement entropy for superconformal RG Interfaces

Abstract

We study the defect contribution to the entanglement entropy of a spherical region centred on four-dimensional superconformal RG interfaces. These interfaces are supersymmetric codimension one defects separating the Leigh--Strassler SCFT vacuum and the $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM theory deformed by spatially varying mass terms. Exploiting the holographic dual to these interfaces, we extract a cutoff-independent interface contribution to the entanglement entropy, ${\mathcal{C}}^I$. We quantify the non-trivial dependence of ${\mathcal{C}}^I$ on the supersymmetric mass deformation, and observe a scaling regime for large deformations. We further relate ${\mathcal{C}}^I$ to the renormalized on-shell action and the stress-tensor one-point function of the interface theory. Our results provide the first fully backreacted holographic computation of this entanglement quantity for superconformal RG interfaces in more than two dimensions.

35 pages, 8 figures