We study general entanglement properties of the excited states of the one-dimensional translational invariant free fermions and coupled harmonic oscillators. In particular, using the integrals of motion, we prove that these Hamiltonians independent of the gap (mass) have infinite excited states that can be described by conformal field theories with integer or half-integer central charges. In the case of free fermions, we also show that because of the huge degeneracy in the spectrum, even a gapless Hamiltonian can have excited states with an area law. Finally, we study the universal average entanglement entropy over eigenstates of the Hamiltonian of the free fermions introduced recently in Vidmar et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 020601 (2017)]. In particular, using a duality relation, we map the average bipartite entanglement entropy over all the exponential numbers of eigenstates of a generic free fermion Hamiltonian to the problem of the calculation of the average multibipartite entanglement entropy over a single eigenstate of the
XX chain. This relation can be useful for experimental measurement of the universal average entanglement entropy. Part of our conclusions can be extended to the quantum spin chains that are associated with the free fermions via Jordan-Wigner transformation.
We study the temporal evolution of the entanglement hamiltonian of an interval after a global quantum quench in free lattice models in one spatial dimension. In a harmonic chain we explore a quench of the frequency parameter. In a chain of free fermions at half filling we consider the evolution of the ground state of a fully dimerised chain through the homogeneous hamiltonian. We focus on critical evolution hamiltonians. The temporal evolutions of the gaps in the entanglement spectrum are analysed. The entanglement hamiltonians in these models are characterised by matrices that provide also contours for the entanglement entropies. The temporal evolution of these contours for the entanglement entropy is studied, also by employing existing conformal field theory results for the semi-infinite line and the quasi-particle picture for the global quench.
The Jordan-Wigner transformation is frequently utilised to rewrite quantum spin chains in terms of fermionic operators. When the resulting Hamiltonian is bilinear in these fermions, i.e. the fermions are free, the exact spectrum follows from the eigenvalues of a matrix whose size grows only linearly with the volume of the system. However, several Hamiltonians that do not admit a Jordan-Wigner transformation to fermion bilinears still have the same type of free-fermion spectra. The spectra of such “free fermions in disguise” models can be found exactly by an intricate but explicit construction of the raising and lowering operators. We generalise the methods further to find a family of such spin chains. We compute the exact spectrum, and generalise an elegant graph-theory construction. We also explain how this family admits an N=2 lattice supersymmetry.