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Unpublished Paper
Chemical Potential in the First Law for Holographic Entanglement Entropy
Journal of High Energy Physics (2014)
  • David Kastor, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  • Sourya Ray
  • Jennie Traschen, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Abstract

Entanglement entropy in conformal field theories is known to satisfy a first law. For spherical entangling surfaces, this has been shown to follow via the AdS/CFT correspondence and the holographic prescription for entanglement entropy from the bulk first law for Killing horizons. The bulk first law can be extended to include variations in the cosmological constant Λ, which we established in earlier work. Here we show that this implies an extension of the boundary first law to include varying the number of degrees of freedom of the boundary CFT. The thermodynamic potential conjugate to Λ in the bulk is called the thermodynamic volume and has a simple geometric formula. In the boundary first law it plays the role of a chemical potential. For the bulk minimal surface Σ corresponding to a boundary sphere, the thermodynamic volume is found to be proportional to the area of Σ, in agreement with the variation of the known result for entanglement entropy of spheres. The dependence of the CFT chemical potential on the entanglement entropy and number of degrees of freedom is similar to how the thermodynamic chemical potential of an ideal gas depends on entropy and particle number.

Keywords
  • AdS-CFT Correspondence,
  • Black Holes
Publication Date
November 21, 2014
Comments
This is the pre-published version harvested from ArXiv.org. The published version is located at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FJHEP11(2014)120.
Citation Information
David Kastor, Sourya Ray and Jennie Traschen. "Chemical Potential in the First Law for Holographic Entanglement Entropy" Journal of High Energy Physics (2014)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_kastor/41/