Higher spin entanglement entropy from CFT

Abstract: We consider free fermion and free boson CFTs in two dimensions, deformed by a chemical potential $\mu$ for the spin-three current. For the CFT on the infinite spatial line, we calculate the finite temperature entanglement entropy of a single interval perturbatively to second order in $\mu$ in each of the theories. We find that the result in each case is given by the same non-trivial function of temperature and interval length. Remarkably, we further obtain the same formula using a recent Wilson line proposal for the holographic entanglement entropy, in holomorphically factorized form, associated to the spin-three black hole in SL(3, R) x SL(3, R) Chern-Simons theory. Our result suggests that the order $\mu^2$ correction to the entanglement entropy may be universal for W-algebra CFTs with spin-three chemical potential, and constitutes a check of the holographic entanglement entropy proposal for higher spin theories of gravity in AdS_3.