Renormalized entanglement entropy

Abstract

We develop a renormalization method for holographic entanglement entropy based on area renormalization of entangling surfaces. The renormalized entanglement en-tropy is derived for entangling surfaces in asymptotically locally anti-de Sitter spacetimes in general dimensions and for entangling surfaces in four dimensional holographic renor-malization group flows. The renormalized entanglement entropy for disk regions in AdS4 spacetimes agrees precisely with the holographically renormalized action for AdS4 with spherical slicing and hence with the F quantity, in accordance with the Casini-Huerta-Myers map. We present a generic class of holographic RG flows associated with deforma-tions by operators of dimension 3/2 < Δ < 5/2 for which the F quantity increases along the RG flow, hence violating the strong version of the F theorem. We conclude by explaining how the renormalized entanglement entropy can be derived directly from the renormalized partition function using the replica trick i.e. our renormalization method for the entangle-ment entropy is inherited directly from that of the partition function. We show explicitly how the entanglement entropy counterterms can be derived from the standard holographic renormalization counterterms for asymptotically locally anti-de Sitter spacetimes.