Entanglement entropy of a color flux tube in (2+1)D Yang-Mills theory

Abstract: We construct a novel flux tube entanglement entropy (FTE$^2$), defined as the excess entanglement entropy relative to the vacuum of a region of color flux stretching between a heavy quark-anti-quark pair in pure gauge Yang-Mills theory. We show that FTE$^2$ can be expressed in terms of correlators of Polyakov loops, is manifestly gauge-invariant, and therefore free of the ambiguities in computations of the entanglement entropy in gauge theories related to the choice of the center algebra. Employing the replica trick, we compute FTE$^2$ for $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills theory in (2+1)D and demonstrate that it is finite in the continuum limit. We explore the properties of FTE$^2$ for a half-slab geometry, which allows us to vary the width and location of the slab, and the extent to which the slab cross-cuts the color flux tube. Following the intuition provided by computations of FTE$^2$ in (1+1)D, and in a thin string model, we examine the extent to which our FTE$^2$ results can be interpreted as the sum of an internal color entropy and a vibrational entropy corresponding to the transverse excitations of the string.