Entanglement criteria for general (pure or mixed) states of systems consisting of N identical fermions are introduced. These criteria are based on appropriate inequalities involving the entropy of the global density matrix describing the total system and the entropy of the one-particle, reduced density matrix.
The study of the entanglement properties of systems of N fermions has attracted considerable interest during the last few years. Various separability criteria for pure states of N identical fermions have been recently discussed but, except for the case of two-fermions systems, these criteria are difficult to implement and are of limited value from the practical point of view. Here we advance simple necessary and sufficient separability criteria for pure states of N identical fermions. We found that to be identified as separable, a state has to comply with one single identity involving either the purity or the von Neumann entropy of the single-particle reduced density matrix. These criteria, based on the verification of only one identity, are drastically simpler than the criteria discussed in the recent literature. We also derive two inequalities verified, respectively, by the purity and the entropy of the single-particle, reduced density matrix, which lead to natural entanglement measures for N -fermion pure states. Our present considerations are related to some classical results from the Hartree-Fock theory, which are here discussed from a different point of view in order to clarify some important points concerning the separability of fermionic pure states.
The violation of uncertainty relations is used as a signature of entanglement for both pure and mixed states of two identical fermions. In the case of fermions with a four-dimensional single-particle Hilbert space we obtain several different types of uncertainty-related entanglement criteria based on local uncertainty relations, on the sum of variances of projectors, and on various entropic measures. Within the latter approach we consider either entropic uncertainty relations involving a single observable or relations based upon the sum of entropies associated with more than one observable. We extend the projector-based entanglement criterion to the case of two-fermion and three-fermion systems with a six-dimensional single-particle Hilbert space.
We review two general criteria for deciding whether a pure bipartite quantum state describing a system of two identical particles is entangled or not. The first one considers the possibility of attributing a complete set of objective properties to each particle belonging to the composed system, while the second is based both on the consideration of the Slater-Schmidt number of the fermionic and bosonic analog of the Schmidt decomposition and on the evaluation of the von Neumann entropy of the one-particle reduced statistical operators. 1
We analyze the problem of quantifying entanglement in pure and mixed states of fermionic systems with a fixed number parity yet not necessarily a fixed particle number. The mode entanglement between one single-particle level and its orthogonal complement is first considered, and an entanglement entropy for such a partition of a particular basis of the single-particle Hilbert space H is defined. The sum over all single-particle modes of this entropy is introduced as a measure of the total entanglement of the system with respect to the chosen basis and it is shown that its minimum over all bases of H is a function of the one-body density matrix. Furthermore, we show that if minimization is extended to all bases related through a Bogoliubov transformation, then the entanglement entropy is a function of the generalized one-body density matrix. These results are then used to quantify entanglement in fermion systems with four single-particle levels. For general pure states of such a system a closed expression for the fermionic concurrence is derived, which generalizes the Slater correlation measure defined by J. Schliemann et al. [Phys. Rev. A 64, 022303 (2001)], implying that particle entanglement may be seen as minimum mode entanglement. It is also shown that the entanglement entropy defined before is related to this concurrence by an expression analogous to that in the two-qubit case. For mixed states of this system the convex roof extension of the previous concurrence and entanglement entropy is evaluated analytically, extending the results in previous reference to general states.