Area terms in entanglement entropy

Abstract

We discuss area terms in entanglement entropy and show that a recent formula by Rosenhaus and Smolkin is equivalent to the term involving a correlator of traces of the stress tensor in the Adler-Zee formula for the renormalization of the Newton constant. We elaborate on how to fix the ambiguities in these formulas: Improving terms for the stress tensor of free fields, boundary terms in the modular Hamiltonian, and contact terms in the Euclidean correlation functions. We make computations for free fields and show how to apply these calculations to understand some results for interacting theories which have been studied in the literature. We also discuss an application to the F-theorem.