Conformal Field Theory Ground States as Critical Points of an Entropy Function

Ting-Chun Lin; John McGreevy

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arXiv · 2303.05444

Conformal Field Theory Ground States as Critical Points of an Entropy Function

Ting-Chun Lin·John McGreevy

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Abstract

We derive an entropy formula satisfied by the ground states of 1+1D conformal field theories. The formula implies that the ground state is the critical point of an entropy function. We conjecture that this formula may serve as an information-theoretic criterion for conformal field theories, which differs from the conventional algebraic definition. In addition to these findings, we use the same proof method to extract the six global conformal generators of the conformal field theory from its ground state. We validate our results by testing them on different critical lattice models with excellent agreement.

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Ting-Chun Lin, John McGreevy. 2023-03-09. Conformal Field Theory Ground States as Critical Points of an Entropy Function. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05444

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