Entanglement in harmonic systems at coherent states

Abstract: It is well-known that entanglement entropy in field theory at its ground state is dominated by an area law term, presenting a similarity to the entropy of black holes. It is interesting to investigate whether this similarity can be extended by showing that gravitational dynamics emerges from the first law of entanglement thermodynamics. Answering this question requires the specification of the modular Hamiltonian. Motivated by the above, we study entanglement in the toy model of harmonic systems lying at any classicalmost state, i.e. any coherent state. We specify explicitly the reduced density matrix and its time-evolution, as well as the modular Hamiltonian. Interestingly, the time evolution is unitary and we specify the effective Hamiltonian which generates it. Our results provide the tools to investigate the similarity between gravity and entanglement in discretized free scalar field theory in the framework of (Phys Rev Lett 71:666, 1993).