Timelike entanglement entropy with gravitational anomalies

Abstract: We study the timelike entanglement entropy (TEE) in two dimensional conformal field theories (CFT) with gravitational anomalies. We employ analytical continuation to compute the timelike entanglement entropy for a pure timelike interval in such CFTs. We find that, unlike the real part, the imaginary part of the TEE displays an asymmetric dependence on the central charges of the left and right moving modes. We propose that the asymmetric dependence on central charges of the imaginary part of the TEE can be used to probe the presence of gravitational anomalies in chiral CFT. Furthermore, we propose a holographic construction to obtain the timelike entanglement entropy from the bulk dual geometries involving topologically massive gravity in AdS$_3$. The holographic results obtained matches exactly with the dual field theory results.