Entanglement Enabled Tomography of Flux Tubes in (2+1)D Yang-Mills Theory

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Hauptverfasser: Amorosso, Rocco, Syritsyn, Sergey, Venugopalan, Raju
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Amorosso, Rocco
Syritsyn, Sergey
Venugopalan, Raju
author_facet Amorosso, Rocco
Syritsyn, Sergey
Venugopalan, Raju
contents We investigate the entangling properties of the color flux tube between a static quark-antiquark pair in pure gauge Yang-Mills theory. In earlier works, we defined a gauge-invariant flux tube entanglement entropy (FTE$^2$), the excess entanglement entropy of a region of gluon fields that can be attributed to the color flux tube, and demonstrated that it is finite in the continuum limit. FTE$^2$ was shown to have two contributions, one from the vibrations of the QCD string, and the other from its internal (color) degrees of freedom. In this work, we further explore the internal color component in (2+1)D Yang-Mills theory for $SU(N_c)$ gauge groups, varying $2\le N_c\le5$. We identify a novel physical scale in the theory, the entanglement radius $ξ_0$. This radius characterizes the transverse extent of the flux tube that must be completely severed by an entangling region to capture the entanglement entropy of color degrees of freedom. The key feature underlying this phenomenon is its topological nature. This is revealed through systematic studies of multi-slab entangling regions in which FTE$^2$ changes sharply when boundaries of the slabs completely cross-cut the flux tube. We find that $ξ_0$ increases approximately linearly with $N_c$ and is independent of both Rényi replica number and the inter-quark separation length. We also study FTE$^2$ as a function of the entangling region's transverse displacement from the static quark pair and observe behavior consistent with a previously identified intrinsic width $λ$ of the flux tube, with an extracted value in agreement with the inverse mass of the lightest glueball for the gauge groups studied.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17199
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Entanglement Enabled Tomography of Flux Tubes in (2+1)D Yang-Mills Theory
Amorosso, Rocco
Syritsyn, Sergey
Venugopalan, Raju
High Energy Physics - Theory
High Energy Physics - Lattice
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Nuclear Theory
We investigate the entangling properties of the color flux tube between a static quark-antiquark pair in pure gauge Yang-Mills theory. In earlier works, we defined a gauge-invariant flux tube entanglement entropy (FTE$^2$), the excess entanglement entropy of a region of gluon fields that can be attributed to the color flux tube, and demonstrated that it is finite in the continuum limit. FTE$^2$ was shown to have two contributions, one from the vibrations of the QCD string, and the other from its internal (color) degrees of freedom. In this work, we further explore the internal color component in (2+1)D Yang-Mills theory for $SU(N_c)$ gauge groups, varying $2\le N_c\le5$. We identify a novel physical scale in the theory, the entanglement radius $ξ_0$. This radius characterizes the transverse extent of the flux tube that must be completely severed by an entangling region to capture the entanglement entropy of color degrees of freedom. The key feature underlying this phenomenon is its topological nature. This is revealed through systematic studies of multi-slab entangling regions in which FTE$^2$ changes sharply when boundaries of the slabs completely cross-cut the flux tube. We find that $ξ_0$ increases approximately linearly with $N_c$ and is independent of both Rényi replica number and the inter-quark separation length. We also study FTE$^2$ as a function of the entangling region's transverse displacement from the static quark pair and observe behavior consistent with a previously identified intrinsic width $λ$ of the flux tube, with an extracted value in agreement with the inverse mass of the lightest glueball for the gauge groups studied.
title Entanglement Enabled Tomography of Flux Tubes in (2+1)D Yang-Mills Theory
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
High Energy Physics - Lattice
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Nuclear Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17199