Exact mutual information for free massless fermions in any dimension

Abstract

We obtain an exact expression for the Rényi mutual information (RMI) between two spherical regions for a free, massless Dirac field in $d$ spacetime dimensions and for a massless Rarita-Schwinger field in $d=4$. We identify each angular momentum mode in the spherical dimensional reduction of the parent theory with a massive Dirac fermion in two dimensional anti-de Sitter space (AdS). The RMI for each mode can be computed analytically for any Rényi index $n$ in terms of solutions of a Painlevé differential equation. We explore the long and short distance asymptotics of the result, where the sum over modes can be computed explicitly. As a result we are able to find subleading contributions to the long distance expansion in $d$ dimensions for arbitrary $n$, as well as to extract the area and logarithmic coefficients for the case $n=1$ in the short distance regime.

39 pages, 9 figures