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arXiv:quant-ph/0407056 · Physical Review Letters

Quantum Phase Transitions and Bipartite Entanglement

Lian-Ao Wu, M. S. Sarandy, Daniel A. Lidar

Published Dec 15, 2004• 484 citations
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Abstract

We develop a general theory of the relation between quantum phase transitions (QPTs) characterized by nonanalyticities in the energy and bipartite entanglement. We derive a functional relation between the matrix elements of two-particle reduced density matrices and the eigenvalues of general two-body Hamiltonians of d-level systems. The ground state energy eigenvalue and its derivatives, whose nonanalyticity characterizes a QPT, are directly tied to bipartite entanglement measures. We show that first-order QPTs are signaled by density matrix elements themselves and second-order QPTs by the first derivative of density matrix elements. Our general conclusions are illustrated via several quantum spin models.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.93.250404

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Density-functional theory (DFT) is shown to provide a conceptual and computational framework for entanglement in interacting many-body quantum systems. DFT can, in particular, shed light on the intriguing relationship between quantum phase transitions and entanglement. We use DFT concepts to express entanglement measures in terms of the first or second derivative of the ground-state energy. We illustrate the versatility of the DFT approach via a variety of analytically solvable models. As a further application we discuss entanglement and quantum phase transitions in the case of mean-field approximations for realistic models of many-body systems.
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Density functional theory (DFT) has met great success in solid state physics, quantum chemistry and in computational material sciences. In this work we show that DFT could shed light on phase transitions and entanglement at finite temperatures. Specifically, we show that the equilibrium state of an interacting quantum many-body system which is in thermal equilibrium with a heat bath at a fixed temperature is a universal functional of the first derivatives of the free energy with respect to temperature and other control parameters respectively. This insight from DFT enables us to express the average value of any physical observable and any entanglement measure as a universal functional of the first derivatives of the free energy with respect to temperature and other control parameters. Since phase transitions are marked by the nonanalytic behavior of free energy with respect to control parameters, the physical quantities and entanglement measures may present nonanalytic behavior at critical point inherited from their dependence on the first derivative of free energy. We use two solvable models to demonstrate these ideas. These results give new insights for phase transitions and provide new profound connections between entanglement and phase transitions in interacting quantum many-body physics.
We study the distribution of the Schmidt coefficients of the reduced density matrix of a quantum system in a pure state. By applying general methods of statistical mechanics, we introduce a fictitious temperature and a partition function and translate the problem in terms of the distribution of the eigenvalues of random matrices. We investigate the appearance of two phase transitions, one at a positive temperature, associated with very entangled states, and one at a negative temperature, signaling the appearance of a significant factorization in the many-body wave function. We also focus on the presence of metastable states (related to two-dimensional quantum gravity) and study the finite size corrections to the saddle point solution.