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arXiv:2405.14356 · Pure and Applied Analysis

Enhanced area law in the Widom–Sobolev formula for the free Dirac operator in arbitrary dimension

Leon Bollmann, Peter Müller

Published Jun 18, 2025• 1 citation
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Abstract

We prove a logarithmically enhanced area law for all Rényi entanglement entropies of the ground state of a free gas of relativistic Dirac fermions. Such asymptotics occur in any dimension if the modulus of the Fermi energy is larger than the mass of the particles and in the massless case at Fermi energy zero in one space dimension. In all other cases of mass, Fermi energy and dimension, the entanglement entropy grows no faster than the area of the involved spatial region. The result is established for a general class of test functions which includes the ones corresponding to Rényi entropies and relies on a recently proved extension of the Widom-Sobolev formula to matrix-valued symbols by the authors.

DOI
10.2140/paa.2025.7.595

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We prove a logarithmically enhanced area law for all Rényi entanglement entropies of the ground state of a free gas of relativistic Dirac fermions. Such asymptotics occur in any dimension if the modulus of the Fermi energy is larger than the mass of the particles and in the massless case at Fermi energy zero in one space dimension. In all other cases of mass, Fermi energy and dimension, the entanglement entropy grows no faster than the area of the involved spatial region. The result is established for a general class of test functions which includes the ones corresponding to Rényi entropies and relies on a recently proved extension of the Widom-Sobolev formula to matrix-valued symbols by the authors.
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We show that entanglement entropy of free fermions scales faster than area law, as opposed to the scaling ${L}^{d\ensuremath{-}1}$ for the harmonic lattice, for example. We also suggest and provide evidence in support of an explicit formula for the entanglement entropy of free fermions in any dimension ddd, $S\ensuremath{\sim}\phantom{\rule{0ex}{0ex}}c(\ensuremath{\partial}\ensuremath{\Gamma},\ensuremath{\partial}\ensuremath{\Omega}){L}^{d\ensuremath{-}1}\mathrm{log}L$ as the size of a subsystem $L\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$, where $\ensuremath{\partial}\ensuremath{\Gamma}$ is the Fermi surface and $\ensuremath{\partial}\ensuremath{\Omega}$ is the boundary of the region in real space. The expression for the constant $c(\ensuremath{\partial}\ensuremath{\Gamma},\ensuremath{\partial}\ensuremath{\Omega})$ is based on a conjecture due to Widom. We prove that a similar expression holds for the particle number fluctuations and use it to prove a two sided estimate on the entropy SSS.
Abstract We study the asymptotic growth of the entanglement entropy of ground states of non-interacting (spinless) fermions in R3{{\mathbb {R}}}^3R3 R 3 subject to a constant magnetic field perpendicular to a plane. As for the case with no magnetic field we find, to leading order L2ln⁡(L)L^2\ln (L)L2ln(L) L 2 ln ( L ) , a logarithmically enhanced area law of this entropy for a bounded, piecewise Lipschitz region LΛ⊂R3L\Lambda \subset {{\mathbb {R}}}^3LΛ⊂R3 L Λ ⊂ R 3 as the scaling parameter L tends to infinity. This is in contrast to the two-dimensional case since particles can now move freely in the direction of the magnetic field, which causes the extra ln⁡(L)\ln (L)ln(L) ln ( L ) factor. The explicit expression for the coefficient of the leading order contains a surface integral similar to the Widom–Sobolev formula in the non-magnetic case. It differs, however, in the sense that the dependence on the boundary, ∂Λ\partial \Lambda ∂Λ ∂ Λ , is not solely on its area but on the “surface perpendicular to the direction of the magnetic field”. We utilize a two-term asymptotic expansion by Widom (up to an error term of order one) of certain traces of one-dimensional Wiener–Hopf operators with a discontinuous symbol. This leads to an improved error term of the order L2L^2L2 L 2 of the relevant trace for piecewise C1,α\textsf{C}^{1,\alpha }C1,α C 1 , α smooth surfaces ∂Λ\partial \Lambda ∂Λ ∂ Λ .
We consider the fermionic entanglement entropy for the free Dirac field in a bounded spatial region of Minkowski spacetime. In order to make the system ultraviolet finite, a regularization is introduced. An area law is proven in the limiting cases where the volume tends to infinity and/or the regularization length tends to zero. The technical core of the paper is to generalize a theorem of Harold Widom to pseudo-differential operators whose principal symbols develop a specific discontinuity at a single point.
We prove a special case of a conjecture in asymptotic analysis by Harold Widom. More precisely, we establish the leading and next-to-leading term of a semi-classical expansion of the trace of the square of certain integral operators on the Hilbert space L2(Rd)L^2(\R^d)L2(Rd). As already observed by Gioev and Klich, this implies that the bi-partite entanglement entropy of the free Fermi gas in its ground state grows at least as fast as the surface area of the spatially bounded part times a logarithmic enhancement.