Entanglement entropy, dualities, and deconfinement in gauge theories

Understand

Computing the entanglement entropy in confining gauge theories is often accompanied by puzzles and ambiguities.

• In this work we show that compactifying the theory on a small circle $\mathbb S^1_L$ evades these difficulties.
• In particular, we study Yang-Mills theory on $\mathbb R^3\times \mathbb S^1_L$ with double-trace deformations or adjoint fermions and hold it at temperatures near the deconfinement transition.
• This theory is dual to a multi-component (electric-magnetic) Coulomb gas that can be mapped either to an XY-spin model with $\mathbb Z_p$-preserving perturbations or dual Sine-Gordon model.