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arXiv:1403.7640

Correlation in fermion or boson systems as the minimum of entropy relative to all free states

Alex D. Gottlieb, Norbert J. Mauser

Published Mar 29, 2014• 4 citations
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Abstract

In the context of many-fermion systems, "correlation" refers to the inadequacy of an independent-particle model. Using "free" states as archetypes of our independent-particle model, we have proposed a measure of correlation that we called "nonfreeness" [Int. J. Quant. Inf. 5, 815 (2007)]. The nonfreeness of a many-fermion state was defined to be its entropy relative to the unique free state with the same 1-matrix. In this article, we prove that the nonfreeness of a state is the minimum of its entropy relative to all free states. We also extend the definition of nonfreeness to many-boson states and discuss a couple of examples.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1403.7640

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In the context of many-fermion systems, "correlation" refers to the inadequacy of an independent-particle model. Using "free" states as archetypes of our independent-particle model, we have proposed a measure of correlation that we called "nonfreeness" [Int. J. Quant. Inf. 5, 815 (2007)]. The nonfreeness of a many-fermion state was defined to be its entropy relative to the unique free state with the same 1-matrix. In this article, we prove that the nonfreeness of a state is the minimum of its entropy relative to all free states. We also extend the definition of nonfreeness to many-boson states and discuss a couple of examples.
This article is a brief review of "nonfreeness" and related measures of "correlation" for many-fermion systems. The many-fermion states we deem "uncorrelated" are the gauge-invariant quasi-free states. Uncorrelated states of systems of finitely many fermions we call simply "free" states. Slater determinant states are free; all other free states are "substates" of Slater determinant states or limits of such. The nonfreeness of a many-fermion state equals the minimum of its entropy relative to all free states. Correlation functionals closely related to nonfreeness can be defined in terms of Rényi entropies; nonfreeness is the one that uses Shannon entropy. These correlation functionals all share desirable additivity and monotonicity properties, but nonfreeness has some additional attractive properties.
The "nonfreeness" of a many-fermion state ω is the entropy of ω relative to the free state that has the same 1-particle statistics as ω. The nonfreeness of a pure state is the same as its "particle-hole symmetric correlation entropy", a variant of an established measure of electron correlation. However, nonfreeness is also defined for mixed states, and this allows one to compare the nonfreeness of subsystems to the nonfreeness of the whole. Nonfreeness of a part does not exceed that in the whole; nonfreeness is additive over independent subsystems; and nonfreeness is superadditive over subsystems that are independent on the 1-particle level.
We analyze the problem of quantifying entanglement in pure and mixed states of fermionic systems with a fixed number parity yet not necessarily a fixed particle number. The mode entanglement between one single-particle level and its orthogonal complement is first considered, and an entanglement entropy for such a partition of a particular basis of the single-particle Hilbert space H\mathcal{H}H is defined. The sum over all single-particle modes of this entropy is introduced as a measure of the total entanglement of the system with respect to the chosen basis and it is shown that its minimum over all bases of H\mathcal{H}H is a function of the one-body density matrix. Furthermore, we show that if minimization is extended to all bases related through a Bogoliubov transformation, then the entanglement entropy is a function of the generalized one-body density matrix. These results are then used to quantify entanglement in fermion systems with four single-particle levels. For general pure states of such a system a closed expression for the fermionic concurrence is derived, which generalizes the Slater correlation measure defined by J. Schliemann et al. [Phys. Rev. A 64, 022303 (2001)], implying that particle entanglement may be seen as minimum mode entanglement. It is also shown that the entanglement entropy defined before is related to this concurrence by an expression analogous to that in the two-qubit case. For mixed states of this system the convex roof extension of the previous concurrence and entanglement entropy is evaluated analytically, extending the results in previous reference to general states.
Abstract The fermionic von Neumann entropy, the fermionic entanglement entropy and the fermionic relative entropy are defined for causal fermion systems. Our definition makes use of entropy formulas for quasi-free fermionic states in terms of the reduced one-particle density operator. Our definitions are illustrated in various examples for Dirac spinors in two- and four-dimensional Minkowski space, in the Schwarzschild black hole geometry and for fermionic lattices. We review area laws for the two-dimensional diamond and a three-dimensional spatial region in Minkowski space. The connection is made to the computation of the relative entropy using modular theory.
We present an approach for the quantification of quantumness of correlations in fermionic systems. We study the multipartite relative entropy of quantumness in such systems and show how the symmetries in the states can be used to obtain analytical solutions. Numerical evidence of the uniqueness of such solutions is also presented. Supported by these results, we show that the minimization of the multipartite relative entropy of quantumness, over certain choices of its mode multipartitions, reduces to the notion of quantumness of indistinguishable particles. By means of an activation protocol, we characterize the class of states without quantumness of correlations. As an example, we calculate the dynamics of quantumness of correlations for a purely dissipative system, whose stationary states exhibit interesting topological nonlocal correlations.
Fermionic Gaussian states form a central class of classically tractable quantum states, while fermionic non-Gaussianity provides the resource required to go beyond free-fermion dynamics. A key challenge is to quantify this resource through monotones that are both mathematically rigorous and experimentally accessible. Here, we show that the fermionic entropy, defined through the squared Frobenius norm of the correlation matrix, is a strong pure-state Gaussian monotone. Its simple closed-form expression also makes it directly measurable: we show that the associated fermionic purity can be unbiasedly estimated up to additive error ε\varepsilonε using O(ε−2)O(\varepsilon^{-2})O(ε−2) two-copy measurements, independently of the system size. Moreover, we prove that the fermionic entropy obeys asymptotic continuity and, as a direct consequence, establish its operational meaning as the upper bound to the asymptotic rate of non-Gaussianity distillation. We further derive a linear sample complexity bound for tolerant testing of fermionic Gaussian states, providing a quadratic improvement over the state of the art. As a further application of our results, we study unitary designs generated by Matchgate circuits supplemented with Majorana-local non-Gaussian gates. We prove that a linear number of such gates is necessary even to achieve an approximate state 222-design with error below 0.4%0.4\%0.4%. Combined with known nearly linear upper bounds for relative-error designs, this determines the optimal doping level, up to logarithmic factors, across all relevant design notions and reveals the extensive non-Gaussianity cost required to generate Haar-like quantum dynamics in this architecture.