Non-perturbative aspects of entanglement structures in $$T\overline{T }$$-deformed CFTs

A bstract Turning on the $$T\overline{T }$$ -deformation in a two-dimensional CFT provides a unique window to study explicitly how non-local features arise in the UV as a result of the deformation. A sharp signature is the dynamical emergence of an effective length-scale ∝ $$\sqrt{\mu }$$ that separates the local and non-local regimes of the deformed theory, effectively serving as a UV cut-off for computing observables in the local regime. In this paper, we study this phenomenon through the entanglement structures of the deformed theory. We focus on computing the Renyi entropies of single-interval sub-regions in the deformed vacuum states. We pay particular attention to the interplay between the bare entanglement cut-off inherited from the CFT computation and the effects from the $$T\overline{T }$$ deformations. Applying the general replica trick to the string theory formulation of $$T\overline{T }$$ -deformed CFTs, we derive an explicit representation of the deformed replica partition function as a weighted integral of the CFT results evaluated at a dynamical cut-off, which is integrated over. We computed in detail the kernel functions of the integral representation, and performed the saddle-point analysis in the semi-classical limit of small μ . We found that in addition to the perturbative saddle-point which identifies the dynamical cut-off with the bare entanglement cut-off, there exists another non-perturbative saddle-point that identifies the dynamical cut-off with the $$T\overline{T }$$ length-scale ∝ $$\sqrt{\mu }$$ , but whose contribution is exponentially small. We discuss how these non-perturbative effects can shed lights on the mechanism through which the $$T\overline{T }$$ length-scale may eventually replace the bare counter-part and become the effective entanglement cut-off.