In the spectrum of many-body quantum systems appearing in condensed matter physics, the low-energy eigenstates were the traditional focus of research. The interest in the statistical properties of the full eigenspectrum has grown more recently, in particular in the context of non-equilibrium questions. Wave functions of interacting lattice quantum systems can be characterized either by local observables or by global properties such as the participation ratio (PR) in a many-body basis or the entanglement between various partitions. We present a study of the PR and of the entanglement entropy (EE) between two roughly equal spatial partitions of the system, in all the eigenfunctions of local Hamiltonians. Motivated by the similarity of the PR and EE—both are generically larger in the bulk and smaller near the edges of the spectrum—we quantitatively analyze the correlation between them. We elucidate the effect of (proximity to) integrability, showing how low-entanglement and low-PR states appear also in the middle of the spectrum as one approaches integrable points. We also determine the precise scaling behaviour of the eigenstate-to-eigenstate fluctuations of the PR and EE with respect to system size and characterize the statistical distribution of these quantities near the middle of the spectrum.
In the spectrum of many-body quantum systems appearing in condensed matter physics, the low-energy eigenstates were the traditional focus of research. The interest in the statistical properties of the full eigenspectrum has grown more recently, in particular in the context of non-equilibrium questions. Wave functions of interacting lattice quantum systems can be characterized either by local observables or by global properties such as the participation ratio (PR) in a many-body basis or the entanglement between various partitions. We present a study of the PR and of the entanglement entropy (EE) between two roughly equal spatial partitions of the system, in all the eigenfunctions of local Hamiltonians. Motivated by the similarity of the PR and EE—both are generically larger in the bulk and smaller near the edges of the spectrum—we quantitatively analyze the correlation between them. We elucidate the effect of (proximity to) integrability, showing how low-entanglement and low-PR states appear also in the middle of the spectrum as one approaches integrable points. We also determine the precise scaling behaviour of the eigenstate-to-eigenstate fluctuations of the PR and EE with respect to system size and characterize the statistical distribution of these quantities near the middle of the spectrum.
We investigate the behavior of entanglement-entropy on a broad scale, that is, a large class of systems, Hamiltonians and states describing the interaction of many degrees of freedom. It is one of our aims to show which general characteristics are responsible for the different types of quantitative behavior of entantglement-entropy. Our main lesson is that what really matters is the degree of degeneracy of the spectrum of certain nearby reference Hamiltonians. For calculational convenience we study primarily systems defined on large but finite regions of regular lattices. We show that general vector states, being not related to some short-range Hamiltonian do not lead in the generic case to an area-like behavior of entanglement-entropy. The situation changes if eigenstates of a Hamiltonian with short-range interactions are studied. We found three broad classes of eigenstates. Global groundstates typically lead to entanglement-entropies of subvolumes proportional to the area of the dividing surface. Macroscopically excited (vector)states have in the generic case an entanglement-entropy which is proportional to the enclosed subvolume and, furthermore, display a certain Gibbsian behavior. Low-lying excited states, on the other hand, lead to an entanglement-entropy which is usually proportional to the logarithm of the enclosed subvolume times the area of the dividing surface .
We study the bipartite von Neumann entanglement entropy and matrix elements of local operators in the eigenstates of an interacting integrable Hamiltonian (the paradigmatic spin-1/2 XXZ chain), and we contrast their behavior with that of quantum chaotic systems. We find that the leading term of the average (over all eigenstates in the zero magnetization sector) eigenstate entanglement entropy has a volume-law coefficient that is smaller than the universal (maximal entanglement) one in quantum chaotic systems. This establishes the entanglement entropy as a powerful measure to distinguish integrable models from generic ones. Remarkably, our numerical results suggest that the volume-law coefficient of the average entanglement entropy of eigenstates of the spin-1/2 XXZ Hamiltonian is very close to, or the same as, the one for translationally invariant quadratic fermionic models. We also study matrix elements of local operators in the eigenstates of the spin-1/2 XXZ Hamiltonian at the center of the spectrum. For the diagonal matrix elements, we show evidence that the support does not vanish with increasing system size, while the average eigenstate-to-eigenstate fluctuations vanish in a power-law fashion. For the off-diagonal matrix elements, we show that they follow a distribution that is close to (but not quite) log-normal, and that their variance is a well-defined function of ω=E_{α}-E_{β} ({E_{α}} are the eigenenergies) proportional to 1/D, where D is the Hilbert space dimension.
Eigenstates of local many-body interacting systems that are far from spectral edges are thought to be ergodic and close to being random states. This is consistent with the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis and volume-law scaling of entanglement. We point out that systematic departures from complete randomness are generically present in mid-spectrum eigenstates, and focus on the departure of the entanglement entropy from the random-state prediction. We show that the departure is (partly) due to spatial correlations and due to orthogonality to the eigenstates at the spectral edge, which imposes structure on the mid-spectrum eigenstates.
One of the most important predictions of quantum mechanics is the existence of quantum entanglement. Since the inception of quantum theory, the study of entanglement has become ubiquitous in several branches of physics, from high energy to condensed matter physics and quantum information. To this avail, different measures of entanglement in quantum systems have been introduced. The most successful ones are the von Neumann and the Rényi entanglement entropies, which have been heavily studied both in lattice models and in quantum field theories (QFTs). A different, more complete characterization of entanglement is provided by the entanglement (or modular) Hamiltonian, defined as the logarithm of the reduced density matrix. One of the key property of this operator is that, under generic conditions, in 1+1-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) presents a local and few-body structure. Beyond just being of theoretical interest, this property has been recently used to efficiently construct the ground state of spin chains in quantum simulators. A recently introduced generalisation of the entanglement Hamiltonian is the negativity Hamiltonian, a non-Hermitian operator which is more useful for mixed states and tripartite entanglement. In this thesis we study these quantifications in many-body quantum systems and in QFTs. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on fermionic systems at equilibrium, and we obtain analytical expressions for the entanglement and the negativity Hamiltonians in the massless Dirac fermion QFT, both in presence of boundaries and at finite temperature. We compare these predictions in the continuum QFT with numerical calculations on the lattice, showing that a proper comparison requires a non-trivial continuum limit of the lattice expression, which we detail. We also investigate a lattice realisation of a non-unitary CFT, the bc-ghost theory, showing that the entanglement Hamiltonian presents an additional term with respect to the unitary case. In the second part, we study the entanglement entropies in an integrable QFT, the massless renormalisation group flow from the tricritical to the critical Ising CFT, demonstrating that the entropy is monotonically decreasing under the renormalisation group flow, as expected from the entropic c-theorem. In the third part we consider out-of-equilibrium problems. We study the melting of a domain wall configuration, computing analytically the entanglement Hamiltonian and showing that the insertion of a defect dramatically modifies the entanglement properties, changing the growth of the entropies from logarithmic to linear in time. Finally, we study generic quantum quenches in free fermionic theories, using the celebrated quasiparticle picture to obtain a prediction for the evolution of the entanglement Hamiltonian during the quench.
Shannon-Rényi entropies and associated participation spectra quantify how much a many-body wave-function is localized in a given configuration basis. Using these tools, we present an analysis of the ground-state wave functions of various quantum spin systems in one and two dimensions. General ideas and a review of the current status of this field are first given, with a particular emphasis on universal subleading terms characterizing different quantum phases of matter, and associated transitions. We highlight the connection with the related entanglement entropies and spectra when this is possible. In a second part, new results are presented for the participation spectra of interacting spin models, mostly based on quantum Monte Carlo simulations, but also using perturbation theory in some cases. For full antiferromagnetic systems, participation spectra are analyzed in terms of ferromagnetic domain walls which experience a repulsive pairwise interaction. This confinement potential is either linear for long-range Néel order, or logarithmic for quasi-long-range order. The case of subsystems is also analyzed in great detail for a 2d dimerized Heisenberg model undergoing a quantum phase transition between a gapped paramagnet and a Néel phase. Participation spectra of line shaped (1d) sub-systems are quantitatively compared with finite temperature participation spectra of ansatz effective boundary (1d) entanglement Hamiltonians. While short-range models describe almost perfectly the gapped side, the Néel regime is best compared using long-range effective Hamiltonians. Spectral comparisons performed using Kullback-Leibler divergences, a tool potentially useful for entanglement spectra, provide a quantitative way to identify both the best boundary entanglement Hamiltonian and temperature.