This dissertation collects results about witnessing multipartite entanglement in critical spin systems and free-fermion models both at zero and finite temperature.
The interplay of quantum and thermal fluctuations in the vicinity of a quantum critical point characterizes the physics of strongly correlated systems. Here we investigate this interplay from a quantum information perspective presenting the universal phase diagram of the quantum Fisher information at a quantum phase transition. Different regions in the diagram are identified by characteristic scaling laws of the quantum Fisher information with respect to temperature. This feature has immediate consequences on the thermal robustness of quantum coherence and multipartite entanglement. We support the theoretical predictions with the analysis of paradigmatic spin systems showing symmetry-breaking quantum phase transitions and free-fermion models characterized by topological phases. In particular we show that topological systems are characterized by the survival of large multipartite entanglement, reaching the Heisenberg limit at finite temperature.
Quantum entanglement uncovers the essential principles of quantum matter, yet determining its structure in realistic many-body systems poses significant challenges. Here, we employ a protocol, dubbed entanglement microscopy, to reveal the multipartite entanglement encoded in the full reduced density matrix of the microscopic subregion in spin and fermionic many-body systems. We exemplify our method by studying the phase diagram near quantum critical points (QCP) in 2 spatial dimensions: the transverse field Ising model and a Gross-Neveu-Yukawa transition of Dirac fermions. Our main results are: i) the Ising QCP exhibits short-range entanglement with a finite sudden death of the LN both in space and temperature; ii) the Gross-Neveu QCP has a power-law decaying fermionic LN consistent with conformal field theory (CFT) exponents; iii) going beyond bipartite entanglement, we find no detectable 3-party entanglement with our two witnesses in a large parameter window near the Ising QCP in 2d, in contrast to 1d. We further establish the singular scaling of general multipartite entanglement measures at criticality and present an explicit analysis in the tripartite case. Quantum entanglement contains important information about quantum systems, but its calculation is challenging. Here the authors develop a quantum Monte Carlo technique for full tomography on microscopic subregions of a system, enabling extraction of multipartite quantum entanglement in large scale models.
Strange metals exemplify highly collective quantum many-body systems that call for new means of characterization, and there is considerable potential for quantum information approaches contributing to the cause. We investigate multipartite entanglement across the quantum phase transition of a Kondo lattice model using the quantum Fisher information (QFI). We show that the QFI associated with the spin components transverse to the order parameter characterizes the destruction of heavy quasiparticles in the Kondo-destroyed magnetic-ordered phase. The physical origin of this observation is elucidated through an analysis of the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model. We propose to test the results in terms of both unpolarized and polarized inelastic neutron scattering measurements in the ordered part of the heavy fermion phase diagram. Our findings illustrate how different operators of a many-body system can be employed to not only witness multipartite entanglement in different sectors and but also elucidate the overall physics across different parts of the phase diagram.