Central Charge and Entangled Gauge Fields

Abstract

Entanglement entropy of gauge fields is calculated using the partition function in curved spacetime with a boundary. We derive a Gibbons-Hawking-like term from a Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin (BRST) action and a Wald-entropy-like codimension-2 surface term is produced. It is further suggested that boundary degrees of freedom localized on the entanglement surface generated from the gauge redundancy could be used to resolve a subtle mismatch in a universal conformal anomaly- entanglement entropy relation.