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arXiv:1310.7925 · Physical Review Letters

Universal Entanglement Crossover of Coupled Quantum Wires

Romain Vasseur, Jesper Lykke Jacobsen, Hubert Saleur

Published Mar 10, 2014• 25 citations
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Abstract

We consider the entanglement between two one-dimensional quantum wires (Luttinger liquids) coupled by tunneling through a quantum impurity. The physics of the system involves a crossover between weak and strong coupling regimes characterized by an energy scale TB, and methods of conformal field theory therefore cannot be applied. The evolution of the entanglement in this crossover has led to many numerical studies, but has remained little understood, analytically or even qualitatively. We argue in this Letter that the correct universal scaling form of the entanglement entropy S (for an arbitrary interval of length L containing the impurity) is ∂S/∂ ln L=f(LTB). In the special case where the coupling to the impurity can be refermionized, we show how the universal function f(LTB) can be obtained analytically using recent results on form factors of twist fields and a defect massless-scattering formalism. Our results are carefully checked against numerical simulations.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.112.106601

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We consider the entanglement between two one-dimensional quantum wires (Luttinger liquids) coupled by tunneling through a quantum impurity. The physics of the system involves a crossover between weak and strong coupling regimes characterized by an energy scale TB, and methods of conformal field theory therefore cannot be applied. The evolution of the entanglement in this crossover has led to many numerical studies, but has remained little understood, analytically or even qualitatively. We argue in this Letter that the correct universal scaling form of the entanglement entropy S (for an arbitrary interval of length L containing the impurity) is ∂S/∂ ln L=f(LTB). In the special case where the coupling to the impurity can be refermionized, we show how the universal function f(LTB) can be obtained analytically using recent results on form factors of twist fields and a defect massless-scattering formalism. Our results are carefully checked against numerical simulations.
We study the entanglement entropy of a region of length 2L2L2L with the remainder of an infinite one-dimensional gapless quantum system in the case where the region is centered on a quantum impurity. The coupling to this impurity is not scale invariant, and the physics involves a crossover between weak- and strong-coupling regimes. While the impurity contribution to the entanglement has been computed numerically in the past, little is known analytically about it, since in particular the methods of conformal invariance cannot be applied because of the presence of a crossover length. We show in this paper that the small coupling expansion of the entanglement entropy in this problem is quite generally plagued by strong infrared divergences, implying a nonperturbative dependence on the coupling. The large coupling expansion turns out to be better behaved, thanks to powerful results from the boundary CFT formulation and, in some cases, the underlying integrability of the problem. However, it is clear that this expansion does not capture well the crossover physics. In the integrable case---which includes problems such as an XXZXXZXXZ chain with a modified link, the interacting resonant level model or the anisotropic Kondo model---a nonperturbative approach is in principle possible using form factors. We adapt in this paper the ideas of Cardy et al. [J. Stat. Phys. 130, 129 (2008)] and Castro-Alvaredo and Doyon [J. Stat. Phys. 134, 105 (2009)] to the gapless case and show that, in the rather simple case of the resonant level model, and after some additional renormalizations, the form-factors approach yields remarkably accurate results for the entanglement all the way from short to large distances. This is confirmed by detailed comparison with numerical simulations. Both our form factor and numerical results are compatible with a nonperturbative form at short distance.
We study the time dependence of the entanglement between two quantum wires after suddenly connecting them via tunneling through an impurity. The result at large times is given by the well known formula S(t) \approx {1\over 3}\ln {t} . We show that the intermediate time regime can be described by a universal cross-over formula S=F(tT_K) S = F ( t T K ) , where T_K T K is the crossover (Kondo) temperature: the function F F describes the dynamical “healing” of the system at large times. We discuss how to obtain analytic information about F F in the case of an integrable quantum impurity problem using the massless Form-Factors formalism for twist and boundary condition changing operators. Our results are confirmed by density matrix renormalization group calculations and exact free fermion numerics.
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.
We study numerically the universal conductance of Luttinger-liquid wire with a single impurity via the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA). The scale-invariant MERA provides an efficient way to extract scaling operators and scaling dimensions for both the bulk and the boundary conformal field theories. By utilizing the key relationship between the conductance tensor and ground-state correlation function, the universal conductance can be evaluated within the framework of the boundary MERA. We construct the boundary MERA to compute the correlation functions and scaling dimensions for the Kane-Fisher fixed points by modeling the single impurity as a junction (weak link) of two interacting wires. We show that the universal behavior of the junction can be easily identified within the MERA and argue that the boundary MERA framework has tremendous potential to classify the fixed points in general multiwire junctions.
We postulate the existence of universal crossover functions connecting the universal parts of the entanglement entropy to the low-temperature thermal entropy in gapless quantum many-body systems. These scaling functions encode the intuition that the same low-energy degrees of freedom which control low-temperature thermal physics are also responsible for the long-range entanglement in the quantum ground state. We demonstrate the correctness of the proposed scaling form and determine the scaling function for certain classes of gapless systems whose low-energy physics is described by a conformal field theory. We also use our crossover formalism to argue that local systems which are ``natural'' can violate the boundary law at most logarithmically. In particular, we show that several non-Fermi-liquid phases of matter have entanglement entropy that is at most of order ${L}^{d\ensuremath{-}1}\mathrm{log}(L)$ for a region of linear size LLL thereby confirming various earlier suggestions in the literature. We also briefly apply our crossover formalism to the study of fluctuations in conserved quantities and discuss some subtleties that occur in systems that spontaneously break a continuous symmetry.
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.