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arXiv:2210.12109 · Journal of Statistical Mechanics Theory and Experiment

Entanglement and negativity Hamiltonians for the massless Dirac field on the half line

Federico Rottoli, Sara Murciano, Erik Tonni C, Pasquale Calabrese

Published Jan 1, 2023• 19 citations
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Abstract

Abstract We study the ground-state entanglement Hamiltonian of several disjoint intervals for the massless Dirac fermion on the half-line. Its structure consists of a local part and a bi-local term that couples each point to another one in each other interval. The bi-local operator can be either diagonal or mixed in the fermionic chiralities and it is sensitive to the boundary conditions. The knowledge of such entanglement Hamiltonian is the starting point to evaluate the negativity Hamiltonian, i.e. the logarithm of the partially transposed reduced density matrix, which is an operatorial characterisation of entanglement of subsystems in mixed states. We find that the negativity Hamiltonian inherits the structure of the corresponding entanglement Hamiltonian. We finally show how the continuum expressions for both these operators can be recovered from exact numerical computations in free-fermion chains.

DOI
10.1088/1742-5468/acb262

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Abstract We study the ground-state entanglement Hamiltonian of several disjoint intervals for the massless Dirac fermion on the half-line. Its structure consists of a local part and a bi-local term that couples each point to another one in each other interval. The bi-local operator can be either diagonal or mixed in the fermionic chiralities and it is sensitive to the boundary conditions. The knowledge of such entanglement Hamiltonian is the starting point to evaluate the negativity Hamiltonian, i.e. the logarithm of the partially transposed reduced density matrix, which is an operatorial characterisation of entanglement of subsystems in mixed states. We find that the negativity Hamiltonian inherits the structure of the corresponding entanglement Hamiltonian. We finally show how the continuum expressions for both these operators can be recovered from exact numerical computations in free-fermion chains.
Abstract The negativity Hamiltonian, defined as the logarithm of a partially transposed density matrix, provides an operatorial characterisation of mixed-state entanglement. However, so far, it has only been studied for the mixed-state density matrices corresponding to subsystems of globally pure states. Here, we consider as a genuine example of a mixed state the one-dimensional massless Dirac fermions in a system at finite temperature and size. As subsystems, we consider an arbitrary set of disjoint intervals. The structure of the corresponding negativity Hamiltonian resembles the one for the entanglement Hamiltonian in the same geometry: in addition to a local term proportional to the stress-energy tensor, each point is non-locally coupled to an infinite but discrete set of other points. However, when the lengths of the transposed and non-transposed intervals coincide, the structure remarkably simplifies and we retrieve the mild non-locality of the ground state negativity Hamiltonian. We also conjecture an exact expression for the negativity Hamiltonian associated to the twisted partial transpose, which is a Hermitian fermionic matrix. We finally obtain the continuum limit of both the local and bi-local operators from exact numerical computations in free-fermionic chains.
Abstract We study the moments of the partial transpose of the reduced density matrix of two intervals for the free massless Dirac fermion. By means of a direct calculation based on a coherent state path integral, we find an analytic form for these moments in terms of the Riemann theta function. We show that moments of arbitrary order are equal to the same quantities for the compactified boson at the self-dual point. These equalities also imply the non-trivial result that the negativity of the free fermion and the self-dual boson are equal.
A bstract We study the modular Hamiltonians of an interval for the massless Dirac fermion on the half-line. The most general boundary conditions ensuring the global energy conservation lead to consider two phases, where either the vector or the axial symmetry is preserved. In these two phases we derive the corresponding modular Hamiltonian in explicit form. Its density involves a bi-local term localised in two points of the interval, one conjugate to the other. The associated modular flows are also established. Depending on the phase, they mix fields with different chirality or charge that follow different modular trajectories. Accordingly, the modular flow preserves either the vector or the axial symmetry. We compute the two-point correlation functions along the modular flow and show that they satisfy the Kubo-Martin-Schwinger condition in both phases. The entanglement entropies are also derived.
We study the entanglement negativity for the free, scalar chiral current in two spacetime dimensions, which is a simple model violating the Haag duality in regions with nontrivial topology. For the ground state of the system, both on the line and on the circle, we consider the setups given by two intervals, either adjacent or disjoint. We find analytic expressions for the moments of the partial transpose of the reduced density matrix and the logarithmic negativity. In the limit of small separation distance, this expression yields the same subleading topological contribution occurring in the mutual information. In the limit of large separation distance between the two intervals, the exponential decay of the logarithmic negativity is obtained from its analytic expression. The analytic formulas are checked against exact numerical results from a bosonic lattice model, finding a perfect agreement. We observe that, since the chiral current generates the neutral subalgebra of the full chiral Dirac fermion theory, this analysis highlights how symmetries produce nontrivial features in the entanglement structure that are analogue to those ones already observed in the mutual information for regions with nontrivial topology.
In the context of ground states of quantum many-body systems, the locality of entanglement between connected regions of space is directly tied to the locality of the corresponding entanglement Hamiltonian: the latter is dominated by local, few-body terms. In this work, we introduce the negativity Hamiltonian as the (non-Hermitian) effective Hamiltonian operator describing the logarithm of the partial transpose of a many-body system. This allows us to address the connection between entanglement and operator locality beyond the paradigm of bipartite pure systems. As a first step in this direction, we study the structure of the negativity Hamiltonian for fermionic conformal field theories and a free-fermion chain: in both cases, we show that the negativity Hamiltonian assumes a quasilocal functional form, that is captured by simple functional relations.
In this paper, we calculate the entanglement negativity in free-fermion systems by use of the overlap matrices. For a tripartite system, if the ground state can be factored into triples of modes, we show that the partially transposed reduced density matrix can be factorized and the entanglement negativity has a simple form. However, the factorability of the ground state in a tripartite system does not hold in general. In this situation, the partially transposed reduced density matrix can be expressed in terms of the Kronecker product of matrices. We explicitly compute the entanglement negativity for the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, the integer Quantum Hall state, and a homogeneous one-dimensional chain. We find that the entanglement negativity for the integer quantum Hall states shows an area law behavior. For the entanglement negativity of two adjacent intervals in a homogeneous one-dimensional gas, we find agreement with the conformal field theory. Our method provides a numerically feasible way to study the entanglement negativity in free-fermion systems.