Logarithmic negativity is a proper measure of quantum entanglement in mixed states. Originally proposed in the context of quantum information, in recent years it is attracting interest in quantum field theory, condensed matter physics, and statistical physics. The key object to construct the negativity is the partial transpose of the reduced density matrix. Here, focusing on two adjacent intervals, the authors provide a complete study of the distribution of the eigenvalues of the partial transpose (negativity spectrum) for gapless one-dimensional systems described by a conformal field theory (CFT). Similar to the entanglement spectrum, the distribution of the negativity spectrum is universal, and it depends only on the central charge of the underlying CFT. The precise form of the spectrum depends on whether the two intervals are in a pure or mixed state, and in both cases, a dependence on the sign of the eigenvalues is found. This dependence is weak for bulk eigenvalues, whereas it is strong at the spectrum edges. The authors also investigate the scaling of the smallest (negative) and largest (positive) eigenvalues of the partial transpose. The analytical results are thoroughly checked against numerical DMRG simulations as well as in exactly solvable models.
Logarithmic negativity is a proper measure of quantum entanglement in mixed states. Originally proposed in the context of quantum information, in recent years it is attracting interest in quantum field theory, condensed matter physics, and statistical physics. The key object to construct the negativity is the partial transpose of the reduced density matrix. Here, focusing on two adjacent intervals, the authors provide a complete study of the distribution of the eigenvalues of the partial transpose (negativity spectrum) for gapless one-dimensional systems described by a conformal field theory (CFT). Similar to the entanglement spectrum, the distribution of the negativity spectrum is universal, and it depends only on the central charge of the underlying CFT. The precise form of the spectrum depends on whether the two intervals are in a pure or mixed state, and in both cases, a dependence on the sign of the eigenvalues is found. This dependence is weak for bulk eigenvalues, whereas it is strong at the spectrum edges. The authors also investigate the scaling of the smallest (negative) and largest (positive) eigenvalues of the partial transpose. The analytical results are thoroughly checked against numerical DMRG simulations as well as in exactly solvable models.
A basic diagnostic of entanglement in mixed quantum states is known as the positive partial transpose (PT) criterion. Such criterion is based on the observation that the spectrum of the partially transposed density matrix of an entangled state contains negative eigenvalues, in turn, used to define an entanglement measure called the logarithmic negativity. Despite the great success of logarithmic negativity in characterizing bosonic many-body systems, generalizing the operation of PT to fermionic systems remained a technical challenge until recently when a more natural definition of PT for fermions that accounts for the Fermi statistics has been put forward. In this paper, we study the many-body spectrum of the reduced density matrix of two adjacent intervals for one-dimensional free fermions after applying the fermionic PT. We show that in general there is a freedom in the definition of such operation which leads to two different definitions of PT: the resulting density matrix is Hermitian in one case, while it becomes pseudo-Hermitian in the other case. Using the path-integral formalism, we analytically compute the leading order term of the moments in both cases and derive the distribution of the corresponding eigenvalues over the complex plane. We further verify our analytical findings by checking them against numerical lattice calculations.
In this thesis we study entanglement in one-dimensional critical quantum many-body systems and in particular we will focus on disconnected regions. Given a system in a pure state, to quantify the amount of entanglement between a multicomponent subsystem and the rest of the full system we can use as an entanglement measure the renowned entanglement entropy. However, if we are interested in the entanglement shared among the disconnected regions, the entanglement entropy fails to be a good quantifier. The reason is that the state of the subsystem is in general mixed once the rest is traced out, and the entanglement entropy is a good measure of entanglement only for pure states. A good measure of entanglement in mixed states is the logarithmic negativity, which is the quantitative version of Peres' criterion of separability. The main advantage of the negativity with respect to other entanglement measures is the simplicity of its definition in terms of the density matrix describing the quantum state. Since the definition does not require any variational calculus, it is much more easily computable than any other entanglement measure, and therefore we can obtain some results also in complicated settings such as many-body systems. We will be mostly interested in the configuration where the full system is divided into two parts, A and B. If we do not have access to the degrees of freedom in B, we can describe subsystem A through its reduced density matrix, where the degrees of freedom in B have been traced out. The residual subsystem in A will in general be left in a mixed state. Subsystem A is then divided again into two parts, A_1 and A_2, and we will be interested in the entanglement shared by these two components. Knowing the full density matrix, the logarithmic negativity can be easily computed from the eigenvalues of its partial transpose with respect to the degrees of freedom living in one of the two subsystems A_1 or A_2. However, the full density matrix of a many-body state is in general unaccessible, even numerically, since the size of the matrix grows exponentially with the size of the system. If we concentrate on critical systems whose low-energy physics can be described by a quantum field theory, we can resort to its powerful tools to compute the entanglement properties. In particular the main tool is the replica trick. The entanglement entropy is obtained from the moments of the reduced density matrix, while the negativity can be computed from the moments of the partial transpose. However, even the computation of the integer-order moments is not an easy task, and exact analytical results are known only for the simplest quantum field theories. Hence, throughout the thesis we will usually consider conformal field theories, which have an enhanced set of symmetries and therefore allow for some exact computations. In the Introduction, we will try to frame this work by briefly reviewing some of the main topics in the literature of quantum many-body systems and quantum field theories where entanglement plays a crucial role. We will also describe what are the main features that are requested to a `good' measure of entanglement, and we will review some of the main measures that have been considered so far in the context of quantum information. We will define the entanglement negativity and stress its main advantages, as well as its drawbacks. After reviewing some basic facts of conformal field theories, we will give some technical details on the computation of entanglement entropy and logarithmic negativity in general quantum field theories, which will be needed in the rest of the thesis. In Chap. 2 we will start the study of the entanglement of several disjoint disconnected regions by considering the entanglement that the union of these regions share with the rest of the system. We will compute the integer-order Rényi entropies of the subsystem from which the entanglement entropy can be obtained through the replica limit. Unfortunately, the exact analytic continuation to real order is still out of reach and therefore the entanglement entropy cannot be computed exactly. However numerical extrapolations allow to obtain some accurate estimates. In the remaining chapters we will focus on the entanglement shared between two non complementary disjoint regions, through the computations of the entanglement negativity in different settings. In Chap. 3, we will consider a global quantum quench starting from a conformal boundary state and evolving through a conformal evolution. A general formula for the mutual information and the logarithmic negativity for two adjacent and disjoint intervals is given in the spacetime limit. In Chap. 4 we focus on the XY chain and we recover a formula for the partial transpose as a sum of four fermionic auxiliary Gaussian density matrices, by generalizing some previous results for the reduced density matrix of spin systems and for the partial transpose of pure fermionc Gaussian states. Even if the computation of the negativity is still out of reach, we can obtain formulas for the integer-order moments of the partial transpose in terms of the correlation matrices relative to the two components and to the region in between them. In Chap. 5 we will study the entanglement negativity for a free Dirac fermion field. Starting from the lattice results, we will obtain a path integral representation of the partial transpose which can be easily generalized to the continuum. With this representation of the partial transpose, we can construct all its integer-order moments and compute them for the simple conformal field theory of the free fermion. Again, the computation of the negativity could not be accomplished due to technical difficulties in the analytic continuation to real order. The same computation has been extended also to the modular invariant Dirac fermion and the Ising model, and the obtained formulas coincide with the ones already present in the literature. This analysis draws an interesting connection between some terms appearing in the formulas for the moments of the partial transpose (as well as of the R\'enyi entropies) found for the lattice models and the ones found for the corresponding theories describing their scaling limit. Whenever possible, all the analytical results will be checked against numerical calculations performed on simple free chain models. In Chaps. 2 and 3 we will consider bosonic Gaussian states, specifically the harmonic chain in its ground state and out of equilibrium, while in Chaps. 4 and 5 we will consider fermionic systems, specifically the XX and Ising spin chains, and the tight-binding model. Finally, we will draw some conclusions and discuss some open problems.
We construct a contour function for the logarithmic negativity and the logarithm of the moments of the partial transpose of the reduced density matrix for multimode bosonic Gaussian states of a free lattice model. In one spatial dimension, numerical results are obtained for harmonic chains either in the ground state or at finite temperature, by considering, respectively, either a subsystem made by two adjacent or disjoint blocks on the line or a bipartition of the circle. The contour function of the logarithmic negativity diverges only at the entangling points, while the contour function for the logarithm of the moments of the partial transpose is divergent also at the boundary of the bipartite subsystem, as functions of the position. In a two-dimensional conformal field theory, analytic expressions that describe these divergencies are discussed. In one spatial dimension, we explore the partial derivative of the logarithmic negativity of two adjacent intervals with respect to the logarithm of the harmonic ratio of their lengths while their ratio and the other parameters are kept fixed. Considering the ground state of the harmonic chain on the line and in the massive regime, we report numerical results showing that this quantity displays a monotonically decreasing behaviour.
Entanglement of mixed quantum states can be quantified using the partial transpose and its corresponding entanglement measure, the logarithmic negativity. Recently, the notion of partial transpose has been extended to systems of anyons, which are exotic quasiparticles whose exchange statistics go beyond the bosonic and fermionic cases. Studying the fundamental properties of this anyonic partial transpose, we first reveal that when applied to the special case of fermionic systems, it can be reduced to the fermionic partial transpose or its twisted variant depending on whether or not a boundary Majorana fermion is present. Focusing on ground state properties, we find that the anyonic partial transpose captures both the correct entanglement scaling for gapless systems, as predicted by conformal field theory, and the phase transition between a topologically trivial and a nontrivial phase. For non-Abelian anyons and the bipartition geometry, we find a rich multiplet structure in the eigenvalues of the partial transpose, the so-called negativity spectrum, and reveal the possibility of defining both a charge- and an imbalance-resolved negativity.
The entanglement properties of random pure states are relevant to a variety of problems ranging from chaotic quantum dynamics to black-hole physics.The averaged bipartite entanglement entropy of such states admits a volume law and upon increasing the subregion size follows the Page curve.In this paper, we generalize this setup to random mixed states by coupling the system to a bath and use the partial transpose to study their entanglement properties.We develop a diagrammatic method to incorporate partial transpose within random matrix theory and formulate a perturbation theory in 1/L, the inverse of the Hilbert-space dimension.We compute several quantities including the spectral density of partial transpose (or entanglement negativity spectrum), two-point correlator of eigenvalues, and the logarithmic negativity.As long as the bath is smaller than the system, we find that upon sweeping the subregion size, the logarithmic negativity shows an initial increase and a final decrease similar to the Page curve, while it admits a plateau in the intermediate regime where the logarithmic negativity depends only on the size of the system and of the bath but not on how the system is partitioned.This intermediate phase has no analog in random pure states, and is separated from the two other regimes by a critical point.We further show that when the bath is larger than the system by at least two extra qubits the logarithmic negativity is identically zero, which implies that there is no distillable entanglement.Using the diagrammatic approach, we provide a simple derivation of the semicircle law of the entanglement negativity spectrum in the latter two regimes.We show that despite the appearance of a semicircle distribution, reminiscent of Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE), the higher-order corrections to the negativity spectrum and two-point correlator deviate from those of GUE.
Abstract We investigate the spectrum of the partial transpose (negativity spectrum) of two adjacent regions in gapped one-dimensional models. We show that, in the limit of large regions, the negativity spectrum is entirely reconstructed from the entanglement spectrum of the bipartite system. We exploit this result in the XXZ spin chain, for which the entanglement spectrum is known by means of the corner transfer matrix. We find that the negativity spectrum levels are equally spaced, the spacing being half that in the entanglement spectrum. Moreover, the degeneracy of the spectrum is described by elegant combinatorial formulas, which are related to the counting of integer partitions. We also derive the asymptotic distribution of the negativity spectrum. We provide exact results for the logarithmic negativity and for the moments of the partial transpose. They exhibit unusual scaling corrections in the limit Δ → 1 + with a corrections exponent which is the same as that for the Rényi entropies.