Universality for Shape Dependence of Casimir Effects from Weyl Anomaly

We reveal elegant relations between the shape dependence of the Casimir effects and Weyl anomaly in boundary conformal field theories (BCFT). We show that for any BCFT which has a description in terms of an effective action, the near boundary divergent behavior of the renormalized stress tensor is completely determined by the central charges of the theory. These relations are verified by free BCFTs. We test them with holographic models of BCFT and find exact agreement. We propose that these relations between Casimir coefficients and central charges hold for any BCFT. With the holographic models, we reproduce not only the precise form of the near boundary divergent behavior of the stress tensor, but also the surface counter term that is needed to make the total energy finite. As they are proportional to the central charges, the near boundary divergence of the stress tensor must be physical and cannot be dropped by further artificial renormalization.Our results thus provide affirmative support on the physical nature of the divergent energy density near the boundary, whose reality has been a long-standing controversy in the literature.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figure and 3 tables, references added, accepted for publication in JHE

Universality in the Shape Dependence of Holographic R\'enyi Entropy for General Higher Derivative Gravity

We consider higher derivative gravity and obtain universal relations for the shape coefficients $(f_a, f_b, f_c)$ of the shape dependent universal part of the R\'enyi entropy for four dimensional CFTs in terms of the parameters $(c, t_2, t_4)$ of two-point and three-point functions of stress tensors. As a consistency check, these shape coefficients $f_a$ and $f_c$ satisfy the differential relation as derived previously for the R\'enyi entropy. Interestingly, these holographic relations also apply to weakly coupled conformal field theories such as theories of free fermions and vectors but are violated by theories of free scalars. The mismatch of $f_a$ for scalars has been observed in the literature and is due to certain delicate boundary contributions to the modular Hamiltonian. Interestingly, we find a combination of our holographic relations which are satisfied by all free CFTs including scalars. We conjecture that this combined relation is universal for general CFTs in four dimensional spacetime. Finally, we find there are similar universal laws for holographic R\'enyi entropy in general dimensions.Comment: 32 pages,0 figures, references added, appendix added, accepted for publication in JHE