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arXiv:2610.24154

Translation-Invariant Pure States with Exotic Half-Chain Factors

Ruizhi Liu, Jinmin Yi

quant-phmath-phmath.OASubmitted Oct 16, 2026• Announced Oct 20, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We construct translation-invariant pure quasifree fermionic states on the one-dimensional lattice whose half-chain von Neumann algebras are hyperfinite factors of type $\mathrm{II}_\infty$ or $\mathrm{III}_λ$ for any $0<λ\leq 1$. Via the Jordan-Wigner-Araki transformation, these yield translation-invariant pure spin-chain states with the same half-chain factors, demonstrating that such factors need not be of type I or III. Each state is the unique ground state of a gapless, translation-invariant parent Hamiltonian with superpolynomially decaying interactions. For any fixed factor type, the interval entanglement entropy can exhibit widely varying growth rates, from arbitrarily slow divergence to nearly power-law growth, showing that entropy scaling does not determine the factor type. In contrast, we prove that gauge-invariant quadratic Hamiltonians with finitely many flavours and exponentially decaying hopping exhibit a dichotomy: their ground states either satisfy an area law with a type I half-chain factor, or have logarithmic entropy growth with a type $\mathrm{III}_1$ factor. The counterexample was discovered with AI assistance.

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45 pages, 3 figures

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We investigate the entanglement entropy of a block of LLL sites in quasifree translation-invariant spin chains concentrating on the effect of reflection-symmetry breaking. The Majorana two-point functions corresponding to the Jordan-Wigner transformed fermionic modes are determined in the most general case; from these, it follows that reflection symmetry in the ground state can only be broken if the model is quantum critical. The large LLL asymptotics of the entropy are calculated analytically for general gauge-invariant models, which have, until now, been done only for the reflection-symmetric sector. Analytical results are also derived for certain nongauge-invariant models (e.g., for the Ising model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction). We also study numerically finite chains of length NNN with a nonreflection-symmetric Hamiltonian and report that the reflection symmetry of the entropy of the first LLL spins is violated but the reflection-symmetric Calabrese-Cardy formula is recovered asymptotically. Furthermore, for noncritical reflection-symmetry-breaking Hamiltonians, we find an anomaly in the behavior of the saturation entropy as we approach the critical line. The paper also provides a concise but extensive review of the block-entropy asymptotics in translation-invariant quasifree spin chains with an analysis of the nearest-neighbor case and the enumeration of the yet unsolved parts of the quasifree landscape.
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We study the von Neumann entropy asymptotics of pure translation-invariant quasifree states of d-dimensional fermionic systems. It is shown that the entropic area law is violated by all these states: apart from the trivial cases, the entropy of a cubic subsystem with edge length L cannot grow slower than Ld−1lnL. As for the upper bound of the entropy asymptotics, the zero-entropy-density property of these pure states is the only limit: it is proven that arbitrary fast sub-Ld entropy growth is achievable.
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