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Rainbow chains and numerical renormalisation group for accurate chiral conformal spectra

Attila Szabó

SciPost Phys. 19, 075 (2025) · published 26 September 2025

Abstract

Based on the relationship between reduced and thermal density matrices in conformal field theory (CFT), we show that the entanglement spectrum of a conformal critical chain with exponentially decaying terms consists of conformal towers of the associated chiral CFT, with only weak finite-size effects. Through free-fermion and interacting examples, we show that these entanglement spectra present a reliable method to extract detailed CFT spectra from single wave functions without access to the parent Hamiltonian. We complement our method with a Wilsonian numerical renormalisation group algorithm for solving interacting, exponentially decaying chain Hamiltonians.

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