Universal rapidity scaling of entanglement entropy inside hadrons from conformal invariance

Abstract

When a hadron is probed at high energy, a non-trivial quantum entanglement entropy inside the hadron emerges due to the lack of complete information about the hadron wave function extracted from this measurement. In the high energy limit, the hadron becomes a maximally entangled state, with a linear dependence of entanglement entropy on rapidity, as has been found in a recent analysis based on parton description. In this Letter, we use an effective conformal field theoretic description of hadrons on the lightcone to show that the linear dependence of the entanglement entropy on rapidity found in parton description is a general consequence of approximate conformal invariance and does not depend on the assumption of weak coupling. Our result also provides further evidence for a duality between the parton and string descriptions of hadrons.