Entanglement entropy of dispersive media from thermodynamic entropy in one higher dimension.
A dispersive medium becomes entangled with zero-point fluctuations in the vacuum. We consider an arbitrary array of material bodies weakly interacting with a quantum field and compute the quantum mutual information between them. It is shown that the mutual information in D dimensions can be mapped to classical thermodynamic entropy in D+1 dimensions. As a specific example, we compute the mutual information both analytically and numerically for a range of separation distances between two bodies in D=2 dimensions and find a logarithmic correction to the area law at short separations. A key advantage of our method is that it allows the strong subadditivity property to be easily verified.
Joint Quantum Institute, NIST/University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.|Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, NIST/University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
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Maghrebi
Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
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Reid