Supersymmetric Rényi Entropy and Defect Operators

Abstract: We describe the defect operator interpretation of the supersymmetric Renyi entropies of superconformal field theories in three, four and five dimensions. The operators involved are supersymmetric codimension-two defects in an auxiliary Z_n gauge theory coupled to n copies of the SCFT. We compute the exact expectation values of such operators using localization, and compare the results to the supersymmetric Renyi entropy. The agreement between the two implies a relationship between the partition function on a squashed sphere and the one on a round sphere in the presence of defects.