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arXiv:1203.2820 · Physical Review B

Entanglement entropy and quantum phase transitions in quantum dots coupled to Luttinger liquid wires

Moshe Goldstein, Yuval Gefen, Richard Berkovits

Published Jun 21, 2011• 13 citations
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Abstract

We study a quantum phase transition that occurs in a system composed of two impurities (or quantum dots), each coupled to a different interacting (Luttinger liquid) lead. While the impurities are coupled electrostatically, there is no tunneling between them. Using a mapping of this system onto a Kondo model, we show analytically that the system undergoes a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless quantum phase transition as a function of the Luttinger liquid parameter in the leads and the dot-lead interaction. The phase with low values of the Luttinger liquid parameter is characterized by an abrupt switch of the population between the impurities as a function of a common applied gate voltage. However, this behavior is hard to verify numerically since one would have to study extremely long systems. Interestingly, though, at the transition the entanglement entropy drops from a finite value of $\mathrm{ln}(2)$ to zero. The drop becomes sharp for infinite systems. One can employ finite-size scaling to extrapolate the transition point and the behavior in its vicinity from the behavior of the entanglement entropy in moderate size samples. We employ the density matrix renormalization-group numerical procedure to calculate the entanglement entropy of systems with lead lengths of up to 480 sites. Using finite-size scaling, we extract the transition value and show it to be in good agreement with the analytical prediction.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.83.245112

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We study a quantum phase transition that occurs in a system composed of two impurities (or quantum dots), each coupled to a different interacting (Luttinger liquid) lead. While the impurities are coupled electrostatically, there is no tunneling between them. Using a mapping of this system onto a Kondo model, we show analytically that the system undergoes a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless quantum phase transition as a function of the Luttinger liquid parameter in the leads and the dot-lead interaction. The phase with low values of the Luttinger liquid parameter is characterized by an abrupt switch of the population between the impurities as a function of a common applied gate voltage. However, this behavior is hard to verify numerically since one would have to study extremely long systems. Interestingly, though, at the transition the entanglement entropy drops from a finite value of ln(2)\mathrm{ln}(2)ln(2) to zero. The drop becomes sharp for infinite systems. One can employ finite-size scaling to extrapolate the transition point and the behavior in its vicinity from the behavior of the entanglement entropy in moderate size samples. We employ the density matrix renormalization-group numerical procedure to calculate the entanglement entropy of systems with lead lengths of up to 480 sites. Using finite-size scaling, we extract the transition value and show it to be in good agreement with the analytical prediction.
We investigate two equivalent, capacitively coupled semiconducting quantum dots, each coupled to its own lead, in a regime where there are two electrons on the double dot. With increasing interdot coupling, a rich range of behavior is uncovered: first a crossover from spin- to charge-Kondo physics, via an intermediate SU(4) state with entangled spin and charge degrees of freedom, followed by a quantum phase transition of Kosterlitz-Thouless type to a non-Fermi-liquid "charge-ordered" phase with finite residual entropy and anomalous transport properties. Physical arguments and numerical renormalization group methods are employed to obtain a detailed understanding of the problem.
The equilibrium physics of quantum impurities frequently involves a universal crossover from weak to strong reservoir-impurity coupling, characterized by single-parameter scaling and an energy scale TK{T}_{K}TK​ (Kondo temperature) that breaks scale invariance. For the noninteracting resonant level model, the nonequilibrium time evolution of the Loschmidt echo after a local quantum quench was recently computed explicitly [R. Vasseur, K. Trinh, S. Haas, and H. Saleur, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 240601 (2013)]. It shows single-parameter scaling with variable TKt{T}_{K}tTK​t. Here, we scrutinize whether similar universal dynamics can be observed in various interacting quantum impurity systems. Using density matrix and functional renormalization group approaches, we analyze the time evolution resulting from abruptly coupling two noninteracting Fermi or interacting Luttinger liquid leads via a quantum dot or a direct link. We also consider the case of a single Luttinger liquid lead suddenly coupled to a quantum dot. We investigate whether the field-theory predictions for the universal scaling as well as for the large-time behavior successfully describe the time evolution of the Loschmidt echo and the entanglement entropy of microscopic models. Our study shows that for the considered local quench protocols the above quantum impurity models fall into a class of problems for which the nonequilibrium dynamics can largely be understood based on the knowledge of the corresponding equilibrium physics.
In a first part, I study the electronic transport through a one-dimensional, finite-length quantum wire of correlated electrons (Luttinger liquid) coupled at arbitrary position via tunnel barriers to two semi-infinite, one-dimensional as well as stripe-like (two-dimensional) leads, thereby bringing theory closer towards systems resembling setups realized in experiments. In particular, I compute the temperature dependence of the linear conductance of a system without bulk impurities. The appearance of new temperature scales introduced by the lengths of the overhanging parts of the leads and the wire implies a conductance function which is much more complex than the simple power-law behavior obtained in earlier approaches. My results can be used to optimize the experimental setups designed for a verification of Luttinger-liquid scaling. In a second part, I suggest a setup to study Luttinger-liquid behavior in quantum wires which allows to determine the Luttinger-liquid parameter from two independent measurements: transport through a quantum dot embedded in the wire and the charge on the dot. To this end, I identified novel Luttinger-liquid power-laws in the charging of the dot. In a more technical part, I extended an adaption of the functional renormalization group such that it can be used on correlated electrons in complex geometries like the wire-lead structures described above and arbitrary dot structures coupled to Luttinger-liquid leads.
We study a system consisting of a Luttinger liquid coupled to a quantum dot on the boundary. The Luttinger liquid is expressed in terms of fermions interacting via density-density coupling, and the dot is modeled as an interacting resonant level onto which the bulk fermions can tunnel. We solve the Hamiltonian exactly and construct all eigenstates. We study both the zero- and finite-temperature properties of the system, in particular, we compute the exact dot occupation as a function of the dot energy in all parameter regimes. The system is seen to flow from weak to strong coupling for all values of the bulk interaction, with the flow characterized by a nonperturbative Kondo scale. We identify the critical exponents at the weak- and strong-coupling regimes.
We investigate a model of two Kondo impurities coupled via an Ising interaction. Exploiting the mapping to a generalized single-impurity Anderson model, we establish that the model has a singlet and a (pseudospin) doublet phase separated by a Kosterlitz-Thouless quantum phase transition. Based on a strong-coupling analysis and renormalization-group arguments, we show that at this transition the conductance GGG through the system either displays a zero-bias anomaly, $G\ensuremath{\sim}{\ensuremath{\mid}V\ensuremath{\mid}}^{\ensuremath{-}2(\sqrt{2}\ensuremath{-}1)}$, or takes a universal value, $G=({e}^{2}∕\ensuremath{\pi}\ensuremath{\hbar}){\mathrm{cos}}^{2}(\ensuremath{\pi}∕2\sqrt{2})$, depending on the experimental setup. Close to the Toulouse point of the individual Kondo impurities, the strong-coupling analysis allows us to obtain the location of the phase boundary analytically. For general model parameters, we determine the phase diagram and investigate the thermodynamics using numerical renormalization-group calculations. In the singlet phase close to the quantum phase transition, the entropy is quenched in two steps: first the two Ising-coupled spins form a magnetic minidomain which is, in a second step, screened by a Kondoesque collective resonance in an effective solitonic Fermi sea. In addition, we present a flow-equation analysis which provides a different mapping of the two-impurity model to a generalized single-impurity Anderson model in terms of fully renormalized couplings, which is applicable for the whole range of model parameters.