arXiv:1408.2570 · Physical Review Letters
Area Law Scaling for the Entropy of Disordered Quasifree Fermions
Leonid Andreevich Pastur, Victor V. Slavin
Abstract
We study theoretically and numerically the entanglement entropy of the $d$-dimensional free fermions whose one-body Hamiltonian is the Anderson model. Using the basic facts of the exponential Anderson localization, we show first that the disorder averaged entanglement entropy $⟨{S}_{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}}⟩$ of the $d$ dimension cube $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ of side length $l$ admits the area law scaling $⟨{S}_{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}}⟩\ensuremath{\sim}{l}^{(d\ensuremath{-}1)},l\ensuremath{\gg}1$, even in the gapless case, thereby manifesting the area law in the mean for our model. For $d=1$ and $l\ensuremath{\gg}1$ we obtain then asymptotic bounds for the entanglement entropy of typical realizations of disorder and use them to show that the entanglement entropy is not self-averaging, i.e., has nonvanishing random fluctuations even if $l\ensuremath{\gg}1$.