Quantum entanglement is one essential element to characterize many-body quantum systems. However, the entanglement measures are mostly discussed in Hermitian systems. Here, we propose a natural extension of entanglement and Rényi entropies to non-Hermitian quantum systems. There have been other proposals for the computation of these quantities, which are distinct from what is proposed in the current paper. We demonstrate the proposed entanglement quantities which are referred to as generic entanglement and Rényi entropies. These quantities capture the desired entanglement properties in non-Hermitian critical systems, where the low-energy properties are governed by the non-unitary conformal field theories (CFTs). We find excellent agreement between the numerical extrapolation of the negative central charges from the generic entanglement/Rényi entropy and the non-unitary CFT prediction. Furthermore, we apply the generic entanglement/Rényi entropy to symmetry-protected topological phases with non-Hermitian perturbations. We find the generic n-th Rényi entropy captures the expected entanglement property, whereas the traditional Rényi entropy can exhibit unnatural singularities due to its improper definition.
Quantum entanglement is one essential element to characterize many-body quantum systems. However, the entanglement measures are mostly discussed in Hermitian systems. Here, we propose a natural extension of entanglement and Rényi entropies to non-Hermitian quantum systems. There have been other proposals for the computation of these quantities, which are distinct from what is proposed in the current paper. We demonstrate the proposed entanglement quantities which are referred to as generic entanglement and Rényi entropies. These quantities capture the desired entanglement properties in non-Hermitian critical systems, where the low-energy properties are governed by the non-unitary conformal field theories (CFTs). We find excellent agreement between the numerical extrapolation of the negative central charges from the generic entanglement/Rényi entropy and the non-unitary CFT prediction. Furthermore, we apply the generic entanglement/Rényi entropy to symmetry-protected topological phases with non-Hermitian perturbations. We find the generic n-th Rényi entropy captures the expected entanglement property, whereas the traditional Rényi entropy can exhibit unnatural singularities due to its improper definition.
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.
We demonstrate three types of transformations that establish connections between Hermitian and non-Hermitian quantum systems at criticality, which can be described by conformal field theories (CFTs). For the transformation preserving both the energy and the entanglement spectra, the corresponding central charges obtained from the logarithmic scaling of the entanglement entropy are identical for both Hermitian and non-Hermitian systems. The second transformation, while preserving the energy spectrum, does not perserve the entanglement spectrum. This leads to different entanglement entropy scalings and results in different central charges for the two types of systems. We demonstrate this transformation using the dilation method applied to the free fermion case. Through this method, we show that a non-Hermitian system with central charge c = -4 c = − 4 can be mapped to a Hermitian system with central charge c = 2 c = 2 . Lastly, we investigate the Galois conjugation in the Fibonacci model with the parameter \phi \to - 1/\phi ϕ → − 1 / ϕ , in which the transformation does not preserve both energy and entanglement spectra. We demonstrate the Fibonacci model and its Galois conjugation relate the tricritical Ising model/3-state Potts model and the Lee-Yang model with negative central charges from the scaling property of the entanglement entropy.
Conformal field theory (CFT) conventionally possesses positive central charges and describes continuous phase transitions in quantum many-body systems. Recently, CFT with complex-valued central charges has been proposed to relate to the discontinuous phase transitions of the Potts models. Here, the authors demonstrate that the scaling of complex-valued entanglement entropy characterizes complex CFT by applying the density matrix renormalization group method to the non-Hermitian five-state Potts model. This study suggests a way to investigate the entanglement properties of complex CFT.
Entanglement entropy has proven invaluable to our understanding of quantum criticality. It is natural to try to extend the concept to "nonunitary quantum mechanics," which has seen growing interest from areas as diverse as open quantum systems, noninteracting electronic disordered systems, or nonunitary conformal field theory (CFT). We propose and investigate such an extension here, by focusing on the case of one-dimensional quantum group symmetric or supergroup symmetric spin chains. We show that the consideration of left and right eigenstates combined with appropriate definitions of the trace leads to a natural definition of Rényi entropies in a large variety of models. We interpret this definition geometrically in terms of related loop models and calculate the corresponding scaling in the conformal case. This allows us to distinguish the role of the central charge and effective central charge in rational minimal models of CFT, and to define an effective central charge in other, less well-understood cases. The example of the sl(2|1) alternating spin chain for percolation is discussed in detail.
Here we show that the Rényi entanglement entropy of a region of large size ℓ in a one-dimensional critical model whose ground state breaks conformal invariance (such as in those described by non-unitary conformal field theories), behaves as , where is the effective central charge, c (which may be negative) is the central charge of the conformal field theory and is the lowest holomorphic conformal dimension in the theory. We also obtain results for models with boundaries, and with a large but finite correlation length, and we show that if the lowest conformal eigenspace is logarithmic ( with N nilpotent), then there is an additional term proportional to . These results generalize the well known expressions for unitary models. We provide a general proof, and report on numerical evidence for a non-unitary spin chain and an analytical computation using the corner transfer matrix method for a non-unitary lattice model. We use a new algebraic technique for studying the branching that arises within the replica approach, and find a new expression for the entanglement entropy in terms of correlation functions of twist fields for non-unitary models.
Abstract The entanglement entropy encodes fundamental characteristics of quantum many‐body systems, and is particularly subtle in non‐Hermitian settings where eigenstates generically become non‐orthogonal. In this work, it is found that negative biorthogonal entanglement generically arises from topologically protected non‐orthogonal edge states in free fermion systems, especially for flat‐band edge states. Departing from previous literature which associated negative entanglement with exceptional gapless points, it is showed that robustly negative entanglement can still occur in gapped systems. Gapless 2D flat‐band edge states, however, exhibit novel entanglement behavior which scales quadratically with the transverse dimension L y , independent of system parameters. This dramatically negative scaling can be traced to a new mechanism known as non‐Hermitian critical skin compression (nHCSC), where topological and skin localization in one direction produces a hierarchy of extensively many probability non‐conserving entanglement eigenstates across a cut in another direction. This discovery sheds light on new avenues where topology interplays with criticality and non‐Hermitian localization, unrelated to traditional notions of topological entanglement entropy. This topologically protected negative entanglement also manifests in the second Rényi entropy, which can be measured through SWAP operator expectation values.