Odd/Even or Half ? Entanglement Anomaly in the Bose-Hubbard model

Abstract

The area law relates the bipartite entanglement entropy of a quantum many-body ground state to the size of the boundary between the subsystems, but the geometry of this boundary is rarely discussed. We inspect this in the 1D Bose-Hubbard model at fixed density by comparing four spatial bipartitions of the periodic lattice: first half, second half, even sites, and odd sites; sharing the same number of sites but differing in how the boundary is arranged. We find analytical limits with perturbation theory: in the Mott insulator the contiguous cut obeys the area lay while the alternating cut obeys a volume law $S\propto N_s$, in this sense an anomaly, and for the superfluid both cuts colapse to the binomial saturation due to delocalization of the state. We formulate these limits as a statement about the many-body problem using a generalized slave-boson approach based on mean-field with quantum fluctuations while verifying with Exact Diagonalization (ED) for small lattice sizes and Densitiy Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) simulations for $N_s\gg 1$. The slave-boson Gaussian ground state allows to compute the entanglement entropy from a reduced correlation matrix for any desired bipartition consistent with ED and DMRG results. Using slave bosons the computational cost is set by the local cutoff $n_{\max}$ rather than the Hilbert space dimension, so we can reach lattice sizes far beyond ED. Our method is capable of establishing the partition-dependent scaling laws as a many-body feature, not only a finite-size effect, in great agreement with the ED for $N_s\in[4,10]$ and DMRG for larger lattice sizes.