Entanglement entropy of linearized gravitons in a sphere

Abstract

We compute the entanglement entropy of a massless spin 2 field in a sphere in flat Minkowski space. We describe the theory with a linearized metric perturbation field hμν and decompose the field into independent modes using tensor spherical harmonics. We fix the gauge such that (a) the two dynamical modes for each angular momentum decouple and have the dynamics of scalar spherical modes, and (b) the gauge-fixed field degrees of freedom inside the sphere represent gauge invariant operators of the theory localized in the same region. In this way the entanglement entropy turns out to be equivalent to the one of a pair of free massless scalars where the contributions of the l=0 and l=1 modes have been subtracted. The result for the coefficient of the universal logarithmic term is -61/45 and coincides with that computed using a regularization based on the mutual information.