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 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 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.
We examine distinct measures of fermionic entanglement in the exact ground state of a finite superconducting system. It is first shown that global measures such as the one-body entanglement entropy, which represents the minimum relative entropy between the exact ground state and the set of fermionic Gaussian states, exhibit a close correlation with the BCS gap, saturating in the strong superconducting regime. The same behavior is displayed by the bipartite entanglement between the set of all single-particle states
k of positive quasimomenta and their time-reversed partners
k. In contrast, the entanglement associated with the reduced density matrix of four single-particle modes $k,\overline{k}, {k}^{\ensuremath{'}},{\overline{k}}^{\ensuremath{'}}$, which can be measured through a properly defined fermionic concurrence, exhibits a different behavior, showing a peak in the vicinity of the superconducting transition for states $k,{k}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ close to the Fermi level and becoming small in the strong coupling regime. In the latter, such reduced state exhibits, instead, a finite mutual information and quantum discord. While the first measures can be correctly estimated with the BCS approximation, the previous four-level concurrence lies strictly beyond the latter, requiring at least a particle-number projected BCS treatment for its description. Formal properties of all previous entanglement measures are as well discussed.
We discuss the relation between fermion entanglement and bipartite entanglement. We first show that an exact correspondence between them arises when the states are constrained to have a definite local number parity. Moreover, for arbitrary states in a four-dimensional single-particle Hilbert space, the fermion entanglement is shown to measure the entanglement between two distinguishable qubits defined by a suitable partition of this space. Such entanglement can be used as a resource for tasks like quantum teleportation. On the other hand, this fermionic entanglement provides a lower bound to the entanglement of an arbitrary bipartition, although in this case the local states involved will generally have different number parities. Finally, the fermionic implementation of the teleportation and superdense coding protocols based on qubits with odd and even number parity is discussed, together with the role of the previous types of entanglement.
We study the ground state properties of the one-dimensional extended Hubbard model at half filling from the perspective of its particle reduced density matrix. We focus on the reduced density matrix of two fermions and perform an analysis of its quantum correlations and coherence along the different phases of the model. Specifically, we study its (i) entanglement entropy, (ii) ${\ensuremath{\ell}}_{1}$ norm of coherence, (iii) irreducible two-body cumulant matrix, and (iv) entanglement spectrum. Our results show that these different properties are complementary to each other depending on the phase of the system, exhibiting peculiar behaviors such as discontinuities and maximum or minimum values at the quantum phase transitions, thus providing a qualitative view of the phase diagram of the model. In particular, in the superconducting region, we obtain that the entanglement spectrum signals a transition from a dominant singlet (SS) to triplet (TS) pairing ordering in the system. Moreover, from the analysis of the dominant eigenvector in the reduced state, we can relate the SS-TS transition to the spatial separation between the fermion pairs in the two different pairing orderings. The entanglement gap is also able to highlight a transition---at a few-body level---in the ground state wave function, not discussed previously in the literature. While other quantifiers are less sensitive to few-body defects in the wave function, the entanglement gap can work as a magnifying glass for these, capturing such small fluctuations.
Fermionic Hamiltonians play a critical role in quantum chemistry, one of the most promising use cases for near-term quantum computers. However, since encoding nonlocal fermionic statistics using conventional qubits results in significant computational overhead, fermionic quantum hardware, such as fermion atom arrays, were proposed as a more efficient platform. In this context, we here study the many-body entanglement structure of fermionic
N-particle states by concentrating on
M-body reduced density matrices (DMs) across various bipartitions in Fock space. The von Neumann entropy of the reduced DM is a basis independent entanglement measure which generalizes the traditional quantum chemistry concept of the one-particle DM entanglement, which characterizes how a single fermion is entangled with the rest. We carefully examine the upper bounds on the
M-body entanglement, which are analogous to the volume law of conventional entanglement measures. To this end, we establish a connection between
M-body reduced DM and the mathematical structure of hypergraphs. Specifically, we show that a special class of hypergraphs, known as
t-designs, corresponds to maximally entangled fermionic states. We also explore fermionic many-body entanglement in random states. We semianalytically demonstrate that the distribution of reduced DMs associated with random fermionic states corresponds to the trace-fixed Wishart-Laguerre random matrix ensemble. In the limit of large single-particle dimension
D and a non-zero filling fraction, random states asymptotically become absolutely maximally entangled. We also analyze many-body entanglement in interacting fermionic systems by using the
M-body DM. We demonstrate that if a particle number conserving fermionic Hamiltonian contains only up to
M-body interaction terms, then its
N-particle ground state cannot be maximally
M-body entangled. As a key step in the proof, we show that the energy expectation value of a maximally
M-body mixed state is equal to the spectral mean of the Hamiltonian on the corresponding
N-particle subspace. We further demonstrate that the many-body entanglement structure of a ground state can place quantitative constraint on the interaction strength of its parent Hamiltonian. We illustrate the theorem and its implications in Hubbard and extended SYK models. Going beyond ground states, we analyze entanglement generation under unitary dynamics from Slater-determinant initial states in these models. We determine early-time growth and estimate entanglement saturation times. Finally, we derive explicit symmetry-refined saturation upper bounds for
M-body entanglement in the presence of an Abelian symmetry.
Typically in many-body systems the correlation energy, which is defined as the difference between the exact ground-state energy and the mean-field solution, has been a measure of the system's total correlations. However, under the quantum information context, it is possible to define some quantities in terms of the system's constituents that measure the classical and quantum correlations, such as the entanglement entropy, mutual information, quantum discord, one-body entropy, etc. In this work we apply concepts of quantum information in fermionic systems in order to study traditional correlation measures (the relative correlation energy). Concretely, we analyze the two- and three-level Lipkin models, which are exactly solvable (but nontrivial) models commonly used in the context of the many-body problem. We conclude that the correlation energy is not a good estimator of the total correlation of the system, and information theoretic measures should be considered.