Area law for the entanglement entropy of the free Fermi gas at nonzero temperature
Hajo Leschke, Alexander V. Sobolev, Wolfgang Spitzer
Abstract
The leading asymptotic large-scale behavior of the spatially bipartite entanglement entropy (EE) of the free Fermi gas infinitely extended in multidimensionsal Euclidean space at zero absolute temperature, T=0, is by now well understood. Here, we announce and discuss the first rigorous results for the corresponding EE of thermal equilibrium states at T>0. The leading large-scale term of this thermal EE turns out to be twice the leading finite-size correction to the infinite-volume thermal entropy (density). Not surprisingly, this correction is just the thermal entropy on the boundary surface of the bipartition. However, it is given by a rather complicated analytical expression derived from semiclassical functional calculus and differs, at least at high temperature, from simpler expressions previously obtained by arguments based on conformal field theory. In the zero-temperature limit, the leading large-scale term of the thermal EE considerably simplifies and displays a ln(1/T)-singularity which one may identify with the known logarithmic correction at T=0 to the so-called area-law scaling. Our results extend to the whole one-parameter family of (quantum) R\'enyi entropies.