Abstract
We calculate Sorkin's manifestly covariant, spacetime entanglement entropy (SSEE) for a massive and massless minimally coupled free Gaussian scalar field for the de Sitter horizon and Schwarzschild de Sitter horizons, respectively, in d > 2. In de Sitter spacetime we restrict the Bunch-Davies vacuum in the conformal patch to the static patch to obtain a mixed state. The finiteness of the spatial L2 norm in the static patch implies that the SSEE is well defined for each mode. We find that for this mixed state it is independent of the effective mass of the scalar field and matches results obtained by Higuchi and Yamamoto, where, a spatial density matrix was used to calculate the horizon entanglement entropy. Using a cut-off in the angular modes we show that the SSEE is proportional to the area of the de Sitter cosmological horizon. Our analysis can be carried over to the black hole and cosmological horizon in Schwarzschild de Sitter spacetime, which also has finite spatial L2 norm in the static regions. Although the explicit form of the modes is not known in this case, we use appropriate boundary conditions for a massless minimally coupled scalar field, to find the mode-wise SSEE for both the black hole and de Sitter cosmological horizons. As in the de Sitter calculation we see that SSEE is proportional to the horizon area in each case after taking a cut-off in the angular modes.