Abstract
We employ holography to investigate Liu-Mezei renormalization group monotones in conformal field theories influenced by massive flavor degrees of freedom. We examine the entanglement entropy of a spherical subregion in three holographic field theories — \( \mathcal{N} \) = 1 Klebanov-Witten theory, \( \mathcal{N} \) = 4 SYM theory, and ABJM theory — with fundamental flavor. The gravity dual of massive unquenched flavor is described by dynamical D-branes, and we solve their backreaction in the smeared approximation. We compute entanglement entropy using the Ryu-Takayanagi formula in these backreacted geometries. Our findings indicate that the Liu-Mezei A- and F-functions decrease monotonically to leading order in the number of flavors across all examples. Additionally, we calculate the leading flavor contribution to entanglement entropy using an alternative probe brane method that does not require knowledge of backreaction in the bulk geometries. These results consistently match with backreacted calculations in all cases, assuming omission of a specific IR boundary term stemming from a total derivative.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Adam Chalabi, Dimitrios Giataganas, Tony Liimatainen, Karapet Mkrtchyan, Carlos Núñez, Ronnie Rodgers, Miika Sarkkinen, and Javier Subils for useful discussions. N. J. has been supported in part by Research Council of Finland grants no. 345070 and 354533. J. K. is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy through the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence on Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter – ct.qmat (EXC 2147, project-id 390858490), as well as through the German-Israeli Project Cooperation (DIP) grant ‘Holography and the Swampland’. J. K. thanks the Osk. Huttunen foundation and the Magnus Ehrnrooth foundation for support during earlier stages of this work. H. R. is supported in part by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
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Jokela, N., Kastikainen, J., Penín, J.M. et al. Flavors of entanglement. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 270 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2024)270
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2024)270