Holographic Approach to Entanglement Entropy in Disordered Systems

Abstract: We investigate the entanglement entropy of a two-dimensional disordered system holographically. In particular, we study the evolution of the entanglement entropy along renormalization group flows for a conformal theory at the UV fixed point, that is perturbed by weak disorder into a Lifshitz theory at the IR fixed point. Through numerical fitting, we find that the disorder correlations leads to a sub-leading power-law term in the entanglement entropy that vanishes at the IR fixed point. Interestingly, the exponent that controls the power-law vanishing of the sub-leading term seems to be almost universal as it depends very weakly on the strength of the disorder. We show that our results can be put in the context of the c-theorem by defining an effective central charge that decreases along the RG flow. We also investigate disorder induced long-range correlations between the two subsystems by studying the holographic mutual information.