Fermionic Hamiltonians play a critical role in quantum chemistry, one of the most promising use cases for near-term quantum computers. However, since encoding nonlocal fermionic statistics using conventional qubits results in significant computational overhead, fermionic quantum hardware, such as fermion atom arrays, were proposed as a more efficient platform. In this context, we here study the many-body entanglement structure of fermionic
N-particle states by concentrating on
M-body reduced density matrices (DMs) across various bipartitions in Fock space. The von Neumann entropy of the reduced DM is a basis independent entanglement measure which generalizes the traditional quantum chemistry concept of the one-particle DM entanglement, which characterizes how a single fermion is entangled with the rest. We carefully examine the upper bounds on the
M-body entanglement, which are analogous to the volume law of conventional entanglement measures. To this end, we establish a connection between
M-body reduced DM and the mathematical structure of hypergraphs. Specifically, we show that a special class of hypergraphs, known as
t-designs, corresponds to maximally entangled fermionic states. We also explore fermionic many-body entanglement in random states. We semianalytically demonstrate that the distribution of reduced DMs associated with random fermionic states corresponds to the trace-fixed Wishart-Laguerre random matrix ensemble. In the limit of large single-particle dimension
D and a non-zero filling fraction, random states asymptotically become absolutely maximally entangled. We also analyze many-body entanglement in interacting fermionic systems by using the
M-body DM. We demonstrate that if a particle number conserving fermionic Hamiltonian contains only up to
M-body interaction terms, then its
N-particle ground state cannot be maximally
M-body entangled. As a key step in the proof, we show that the energy expectation value of a maximally
M-body mixed state is equal to the spectral mean of the Hamiltonian on the corresponding
N-particle subspace. We further demonstrate that the many-body entanglement structure of a ground state can place quantitative constraint on the interaction strength of its parent Hamiltonian. We illustrate the theorem and its implications in Hubbard and extended SYK models. Going beyond ground states, we analyze entanglement generation under unitary dynamics from Slater-determinant initial states in these models. We determine early-time growth and estimate entanglement saturation times. Finally, we derive explicit symmetry-refined saturation upper bounds for
M-body entanglement in the presence of an Abelian symmetry.
The ground-state entanglement of a single particle of the N-harmonium system (i.e., a completely-integrable model of
N particles where both the confinement and the two-particle interaction are harmonic) is shown to be analytically determined in terms of
N and the relative interaction strength. For bosons, we compute the von Neumann entropy of the one-body reduced density matrix by using the corresponding natural occupation numbers. There exists a critical number
Nc of particles so that below it, for positive values of the coupling constant, the entanglement grows when the number of particles is increasing; the opposite occurs for
N>Nc. For fermions, we compute the one-body reduced density matrix for the closed-shell spinned case. In the strong coupling regime, the linear entropy of the system decreases when
N is growing. For fixed
N, the entanglement is found (a) to decrease (increase) for negatively (positively) increasing values of the coupling constant, and (b) to grow when the energy is increasing. Moreover, the spatial and spin contributions to the total entanglement are found to be of comparable size.
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 observe that the many-body eigenstates of any quadratic, fermionic Hamiltonian with sublattice symmetry have quantized entanglement entropies between the sublattices: the entanglement comes in multiple singlets. Moreover, such systems always have a ground state that is maximally entangled between the two sublattices. In fact, we also show that under the same assumptions there always exists a (potentially distinct) basis of energy eigenstates that do not conserve the particle number in which each energy eigenstate is maximally entangled between the sublattices. No additional properties, such as translation invariance, are required. We also show that the quantization of ground-state entanglement may persist when interactions are introduced.
We show that one-body entanglement, which is a measure of the deviation of a pure fermionic state from a Slater determinant (SD) and is determined by the mixedness of the single-particle density matrix (SPDM), can be considered as a quantum resource. The associated theory has SDs and their convex hull as free states, and number conserving fermion linear optics operations (FLO), which include one-body unitary transformations and measurements of the occupancy of single-particle modes, as the basic free operations. We first provide a bipartitelike formulation of one-body entanglement, based on a Schmidt-like decomposition of a pure
N-fermion state, from which the SPDM [together with the $(N\ensuremath{-}1)$-body density matrix] can be derived. It is then proved that under FLO operations the initial and postmeasurement SPDMs always satisfy a majorization relation, which ensures that these operations cannot increase, on average, the one-body entanglement. It is finally shown that this resource is consistent with a model of fermionic quantum computation which requires correlations beyond antisymmetrization. More general free measurements and the relation with mode entanglement are also discussed.
Symmetries of quantum systems provide a natural way to organize the eigenspaces of many-body Hamiltonians. When degeneracies exist, however, they play a more subtle role as different sets of symmetry operators can resolve the same energy subspace into states with very different correlation properties. We study this interplay using a sequence of FeO and Fe
2O
2 models. For a Hubbard model of FeO, the ground space is 16-fold degenerate. Resolving it by local magnetizations gives a basis of Slater determinants, while total-spin quantum numbers select entangled and non-Gaussian states from the same ground manifold. Adding density-density Hund interactions breaks the independent spin rotations and reduces the ground space to a spin-reversal pair with maximal magnetization. These states are extremely close to Slater determinants in their natural occupations, yet have finite two-body cumulants and conserved-operator algebras whose orbit dimensions differ substantially from the Slater values. Fe
2O
2 provides a larger example in which spatial mode entanglement can be substantial while fermionic non-Gaussianity remains weak, with the conserved-operator structure again distinguishing the state from the corresponding Slater transformation class. Together, these examples show that symmetry resolution, mode entanglement, reduced-density-matrix correlations, and conserved-operator structure provide complementary information about interacting and degenerate electronic ground states.