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arXiv:2203.12079 · Physical Review C

Entanglement entropy, single-particle occupation probabilities, and short-range correlations

Aurel Bulgac

Published Jun 21, 2023• 35 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

For quantum many-body systems with short-range correlations (SRCs), the intimate relationship between their magnitude, the behavior of the single-particle occupation probabilities at momenta larger than the Fermi momentum, and the entanglement entropy is a new qualitative aspect not studied and exploited yet. A large body of recent condensed matter studies indicates that the time evolution of the entanglement entropy describes the nonequilibrium dynamics of isolated and strongly interacting many-body systems, in a manner similar to the Boltzmann entropy, which is strictly defined for dilute and weakly interacting many-body systems. Both theoretical and experimental studies in nuclei and cold atomic gases have shown that the fermion momentum distribution has a generic behavior $n(k)=C/{k}^{4}$ at momenta larger than the Fermi momentum, due to the presence of SRCs, with approximately 20% of the particles having momenta larger than the Fermi momentum. The presence of the long momentum tails in the presence of SRCs changes the textbook relation between the single-particle kinetic energy and occupation probabilities, ${n}_{\text{mf}}(k)=1/{1+exp\ensuremath{\beta}[\ensuremath{\epsilon}(k)\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\mu}]}$ for momenta very different form the Fermi momentum, particularly for dynamics processes. SRCs induced high-momentum tails of the single-particle occupation probabilities increase the entanglement entropy of fermionic systems, which in its turn affects the dynamics of many nuclear reactions, such as heavy-ion collisions and nuclear fission.

DOI
10.1103/physrevc.107.l061602

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For quantum many-body systems with short-range correlations (SRCs), the intimate relationship between their magnitude, the behavior of the single-particle occupation probabilities at momenta larger than the Fermi momentum, and the entanglement entropy is a new qualitative aspect not studied and exploited yet. A large body of recent condensed matter studies indicates that the time evolution of the entanglement entropy describes the nonequilibrium dynamics of isolated and strongly interacting many-body systems, in a manner similar to the Boltzmann entropy, which is strictly defined for dilute and weakly interacting many-body systems. Both theoretical and experimental studies in nuclei and cold atomic gases have shown that the fermion momentum distribution has a generic behavior n(k)=C/k4n(k)=C/{k}^{4}n(k)=C/k4 at momenta larger than the Fermi momentum, due to the presence of SRCs, with approximately 20% of the particles having momenta larger than the Fermi momentum. The presence of the long momentum tails in the presence of SRCs changes the textbook relation between the single-particle kinetic energy and occupation probabilities, nmf(k)=1/1+exp\ensuremathβ[\ensuremathϵ(k)\ensuremath−\ensuremathμ]{n}_{\text{mf}}(k)=1/{1+exp\ensuremath{\beta}[\ensuremath{\epsilon}(k)\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\mu}]}nmf​(k)=1/1+exp\ensuremathβ[\ensuremathϵ(k)\ensuremath−\ensuremathμ] for momenta very different form the Fermi momentum, particularly for dynamics processes. SRCs induced high-momentum tails of the single-particle occupation probabilities increase the entanglement entropy of fermionic systems, which in its turn affects the dynamics of many nuclear reactions, such as heavy-ion collisions and nuclear fission.
The nuclear structure orbital entanglement entropy of short range correlation (SRC) is calculated based on the nuclear scale separation, specifically, the entanglement between the SRC orbitals and the rest of the system. It should be stressed that this is a single nucleon and not a pair entanglement entropy between the proton and neutron. The entanglement arises from the probability for a nucleon to occupy a momentum state above the Fermi momentum. The momentum space of the nucleus separates into two parts such that nucleons can occupy the mean-field part of the wave function, i.e., the Fermi sea (FS) and separately the high-momentum SRC part. The orbital entropy obtained is between these two parts where essentially two momentum subspaces are defined, one containing all the low momentum FS states and the other containing the high-momentum part as a SRC ``orbital'' state. For the calculation of the decoupling of low and high momenta which was established by the similarity normalization group the SRC is employed and viewed as a further orbital which can be multiply occupied. Since the probability of the occupation of a single SRC is given by the nuclear contact a simple general expression of the orbital entanglement entropy for SRC by employing the generalized contact formalism is obtained. This general formula for the SRC orbital entanglement entropy of a nuclear structure in terms of the nuclear contact allows one to obtain the scaling of the entropy in terms of the mass number, AAA. From this formula it is evident that, unlike the entanglement entropy of many quantum systems which scales with the surface area, the orbital entanglement entropy associated with the SRC in large nuclei is linearly dependent on AAA, i.e., it is shown to be extensive.
There is no unique and widely accepted definition of the complexity measure (CM) of a many-fermion wave function in the presence of interactions. The simplest many-fermion wave function is a Slater determinant. In shell-model or configuration interaction (CI) and other related methods, the state is represented as a superposition of a large number of Slater determinants, which in the case of CI calculations reaches about 20 billion terms [Johnson, arXiv:1809.07869]. Although in practice this number has been used as a CM for decades, it is ill defined: it is not unique, and it depends on the particular type and the number of single-particle wave functions used to construct the Slater determinants. The canonical wave functions and/or natural orbitals [L\"owdin, Adv. Phys. 5, 1 (1956); L\"owdin and Shull, Phys. Rev. 101, 1730 (1956); Bardeen et al., Phys. Rev. 108, 1175 (1957); N. N. Bogoljubov, Il Nuovo Cimento 7, 794 (1958); Valatin, Il Nuovo Cimento 7, 843 (1958); de Gennes, Superconductivity of Metals and Alloys (CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 1999); Ring and Schuck, The Nuclear Many-Body Problem, 1st ed. (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2004)] and their corresponding occupation probabilities are intrinsic properties of any many-body wave function, irrespective of the representation, and they provide a unique solution to characterize the CM. The non-negative orbital entanglement entropy, which vanishes for a Slater determinant, provides the simplest CM, while a more complete measure of complexity is the entanglement spectrum. We illustrate these aspects in the case of a complex nonequilibrium time-dependent process, induced nuclear fission described within a real-time density functional theory framework extended to superfluid systems, which can describe simultaneously the long-range and the short-range correlations between fermions. The orbital entanglement entropy of the fissioning nucleus illustrates the localization mechanism of the many-body wave function in Fock and/or Hilbert space. The (minimal) number of Slater determinants required to represent such a complex many-body wave function with a well-defined number of particles in the case presented here is about 10500{10}^{500}10500. The realistic case of the highly nonequilibrium nuclear fission process illustrated here is equivalent to a system of $23.328\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{9}$ interacting quantum spin-1/2 particles, a very large system for the study of quantum entanglement.
The Short-Range Correlations between nucleons in nuclei is regarded as a complex system. We investigate the relationship between the orbital entanglement entropy of SRCs Sij in nuclear structures and Tan contact cij, and find that the orbital entanglement entropies and Tan contacts corresponding to proton-proton SRC pairs and neutron-proton SRC pairs in nuclei demonstrate a scaling relation. More specifically, the proportionality of entanglement entropy between proton-proton pairs and neutron-proton pairs is directly related to the ratio of nuclear contacts within the atomic nucleus, demonstrating an approximate ratio of 2.0. Our research suggests that this scaling relationship should hold true for all symmetric nuclei, furthermore, we offer a possible explanation for this phenomenon.
The entanglement between occupation numbers of different single particle basis states depends on coupling between different single particle basis states in the second-quantized Hamiltonian. Thus, in principle, interaction is not necessary for occupation-number entanglement to appear. However, in order to characterize quantum correlation caused by interaction , we use the eigenstates of the single-particle Hamiltonian as the single particle basis upon which the occupation-number entanglement is defined. Using this so-called proper single particle basis, if there is no interaction, the many-particle second-quantized Hamiltonian is diagonalized and thus cannot generate entanglement, while its eigenstates can always be chosen to be non-entangled. If there is interaction, entanglement in the proper single particle basis arises in energy eigenstates and can be dynamically generated. Using the proper single particle basis, we discuss occupation-number entanglement in important eigenstates, especially ground states, of systems of many identical particles, in exploring insights the notion of entanglement sheds on many-particle physics. The discussions on Fermi systems start with Fermi gas, the Hartree–Fock approximation and the electron–hole entanglement in excitations. In the ground state of a Fermi liquid, in terms of the Landau quasiparticles, entanglement becomes negligible. The entanglement in a quantum Hall state is quantified as − f ln f − (1 − f )ln(1 − f ), where f is the proper fractional part of the filling factor. For BCS superconductivity, the entanglement is a function of the relative momentum wavefunction of the Cooper pair g k , and is thus directly related to the superconducting energy gap, and vanishes if and only if superconductivity vanishes. For a spinless Bose system, entanglement does not appear in the Hartree–Gross–Pitaevskii approximation, but becomes important in the Bogoliubov theory, as a characterization of two-particle correlation caused by the weak interaction. In these examples, the interaction-induced entanglement as calculated is directly related to the macroscopic physical properties.
We will study fermionic systems like atomic nuclei and bosonic systems like the correlated atoms in a trap from an information-theoretical point of view. The Shannon and Onicescu information measures are calculated for the above systems by comparing the correlated and uncorrelated cases as functions of the strength of the short range correlations. One-body and two-body density and momentum distributions are employed. Thus, the effect of short-range correlations on the information content is evaluated. The magnitude of distinguishability between the correlated and uncorrelated densities is also discussed employing suitable measures for the distance of states i.e. the well known Kullback–Leibler relative entropy and the recently proposed Jensen–Shannon divergence entropy. We will see that the same information-theoretical properties hold for quantum many-body systems obeying Bose–Einstein and Fermi–Dirac (statistics).
The nucleon momentum distribution nA(k){n}_{A}(k)nA​(k) for A=2A=2A=2, 3, 4, 16, and 40 nuclei is systematically analyzed in terms of wave functions resulting from advanced solutions of the nonrelativistic Schr\"odinger equation, obtained within different many-body approaches based upon different realistic bare nucleon-nucleon (NNNNNN) interactions featuring similar short-range repulsion and tensor interactions. Particular attention is paid to the separation of the momentum distributions into the mean-field and short-range correlation (SRC) contributions. It is shown that although at high values of the momentum kkk different approaches lead to some quantitative differences, these do not hinder the general conclusion that the high-momentum behavior ($k\ensuremath{\gtrsim}1.5--2$ fm${}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$) of all nuclei considered are very similar, exhibiting the well-known scaling behavior with the mass number AAA, independently of the used many-body approach and the details of the bare NNNNNN interaction. To analyze and understand the frequently addressed question concerning the relationships between the nucleus, nA(k){n}_{A}(k)nA​(k), and the deuteron, nD(k){n}_{D}(k)nD​(k), momentum distributions, the spin (SSS)-isospin (TTT) structure of few-nucleon systems and complex nuclei is analyzed in terms of realistic NNNNNN interactions and many-body approaches. To this end, the number of NNNNNN pairs in a given (STSTST) state, viz., (ST)=(10)(ST)=(10)(ST)=(10), (00), (01), and (11), and the contribution of these states to the nucleon momentum distributions are calculated. It is shown that, apart from the (00) state, which has very small effects, all other spin-isospin states contribute to the momentum distribution in a wide range of momenta. It is shown that for all nuclei considered the momentum distributions in the states T=0T=0T=0 and T=1T=1T=1 exhibit at $k\ensuremath{\gtrsim}1.5--2$ fm${}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ very similar behaviors, which represents strong evidence of the AAA-independent character of SRCs. The ratio nA(k)/nD(k){n}_{A}(k)/{n}_{D}(k)nA​(k)/nD​(k) is analyzed in detail, stressing that in the SRC region it always increases with the momentum and the origin of such an increase is discussed and elucidated. The relationships between the one- and two-body momentum distributions, considered in a previous paper, are discussed and clarified, pointing out the relevant role played by the center-of-mass motion of a correlated pair in the (10) state. Eventually, the values of the the probability of high-momentum components in nuclei and the per nucleon probability a2{a}_{2}a2​ of deuteronlike configurations in nuclei are calculated, and the relationship of the present approach with the many-body methods based upon low-momentum effective interactions is briefly discussed.