Mutual information from modular flow in CFTs

Abstract

The operator product expansion (OPE) of twist operators in the replica trick framework enables a long-distance expansion of the mutual information (MI) in conformal field theories (CFTs). In this expansion, the terms are labeled by primary operators, as contributions from descendant operators can be resummed into conformal blocks. However, for the MI, the expansion involves primaries from the multi-replica theory, which includes far more operators than those in the original theory. In this work, we develop a method to resum this series, yielding an expansion in terms of the primaries of the original theory, specifically restricted to the two-copy sector. This is achieved by expressing the twist operators in a non-local manner across different replicas and using a modular flow representation to obtain the n -> 1 limit of the R\'enyi index. We explicitly compute the resulting "enhanced conformal blocks", which, surprisingly, provide excellent approximations to the MI of generalized free fields across the full range of cross ratios. Remarkably, this approximation appears to be exact in the limit of large spacetime dimensions.