R\'enyi entropy at large energy density in 2D CFT

Abstract

We investigate the R\'enyi entropy and entanglement entropy of an interval with an arbitrary length in the canonical ensemble, microcanonical ensemble and primary excited states at large energy density in the thermodynamic limit of a two-dimensional large central charge $c$ conformal field theory. As a generalization of the recent work [Phys. Rev. Lett. 122 (2019) 041602], the main purpose of the paper is to see whether one can distinguish these various large energy density states by the R\'enyi entropies of an interval at different size scales, namely, short, medium and long. Collecting earlier results and performing new calculations in order to compare with and fill gaps in the literature, we give a more complete and detailed analysis of the problem. Especially, we find some corrections to the recent results for the holographic R\'enyi entropy of a medium size interval, which enlarge the validity region of the results. Based on the R\'enyi entropies of the three interval scales, we find that R\'enyi entropy cannot distinguish the canonical and microcanonical ensemble states for a short interval, but can do the job for both medium and long intervals. At the leading order of large $c$ the entanglement entropy cannot distinguish the canonical and microcanonical ensemble states for all interval lengths, but the difference of entanglement entropy for a long interval between the two states would appear with $1/c$ corrections. We also discuss R\'enyi entropy and entanglement entropy differences between the thermal states and primary excited state. Overall, our work provides an up-to-date picture of distinguishing different thermal or primary states at various length scales of the subsystem.